The Judas Glass (6 page)

“You think it's that simple. We'll file some papers and end what we have together.”

“It's already over.”

“I won't forget how you treated me, Richard. You have torn something out of me.” She was at the front door, years of television causing me to expect the parting zinger, the exit punchline. For the moment, she had power over me, and she knew it.

This was her chance, a crippling parting shot. She stood at the door, looked at me, and said, “Our marriage may be over. I'm not conceding that it is. But I'm going to see you through this crisis. Before I can help you, though, I do think I'll need some time to myself, to prioritize.”
Prioritize
was one of Connie's pet words. She liked to make lists, what had to be done and when. My name would move to the top of her list.

Once again I felt sorry for Connie. I stood there watching her back down the driveway in her Volvo. She caught my eye from the driver's seat, just before she steered the car up the street.

Neither of us waved.

8

They were in the phone book, Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Pennant. I called them, and Simon answered. I asked how Rebecca's parents were bearing up, and I heard the young man take a shaky breath and let it out again before he answered. “Not so good,” he said.

“Maybe if there was something I could say to them—”

“The minister is here,” said Simon.

There was a voice in the background, Rebecca's father. I couldn't make out what he was saying. There was an additional masculine murmur, the voice of reason, compassion.

“If there's anything I can do, Simon,” I said. “For you. For any of you. Please call me.” I gave him my number, and I could hear the faint squeak of a felt-tipped pen on paper. “And please tell your parents I called.”

Simon thanked me, and sounded like Rebecca, his voice warm, full of feeling, so that I did not want to hang up the phone, even while I watched my hand complete the act, settling the receiver into its cradle.

Connie was late. She was usually home by now. It was dusk, and she always called if she was running behind schedule.

I know a lot of people. Solitude had always been a style that looked better on other people. I enjoyed company, someone else watching the television in the shifting light. Surprised by grief, what was I to do but accept the condolences of my friends?

Dr. Opal called, asking how they had treated me at Alta Bates Hospital. “You deserve the best treatment there is,” he said.

The sound of his voice brought back memories, good ones, a sense that the world was an ordered place, rational and loving. Dr. Opal had long been a father figure to me, warm-hearted during my teenage years, when my father was distracted and driven to lose his frustrations in a staggering work schedule. Since my father's death, Dr. Opal was a link with the sunnier aspects of my childhood. “Sometimes emergency rooms are a zoo,” he said.

“You don't like zoos?” I said.

He chuckled. Dr. Opal had gone sailing with my father in the old days, when my father owned one of the first all-fiberglass hulls in San Francisco Bay. Dr. Opal rarely practiced hands-on medicine anymore, always flying off to sit on a commission or give a lecture. His manner, however, was healing, his voice, his touch, always reassuring. “If you need to talk about your loss, Richard, I want to help you,” he said.

“Do you ever have the feeling that life isn't anything like what you thought it was?” I said.

“All too often,” said Dr. Opal. He hesitated, perhaps not wanting to offer unwanted advice. “Drop by and see me. I still make that chili you used to like. Or stop by the office. It's been a thousand years since I played tennis. It would do me good.” He was lonely after the death of his wife. I realized this as I stood there, hearing in his voice the rasp of incipient old age. Sometimes grief makes us more sensitive to the feelings of others, and makes us realize that we have, without meaning any harm, neglected someone close to us.

When the doorbell rang I was on the phone with Stella. I assumed it was a friend dropping by for a cup of coffee or a drink. But when I opened the door, telephone to my ear, no one was there.

There was the lawn, the street, the sycamores. Like many people who prefer the telephone and the computer to the concrete world, I felt myself once again baffled at how a house manages to exist, walls, floors, the door swinging on hinges that never squeak, despite the fact that I had never once oiled them.

I stepped out onto the porch, Stella talking all the while. “If this isn't the moment, Richard, I can call tomorrow.” A large, flat package leaned beside my front doorframe.

“I can tell you have news for me,” I said.

It was almost as tall as I was, wrapped in brown paper. Connie often had imported items delivered here, especially after hours or on weekends. I dragged the package into the room awkwardly with one hand, and leaned it against the wall beside the cello.

“EBMUD wants to be held blameless,” Stella said. “No admission of liability. They don't know why the water was blue.”

“They like unsolved mysteries?” I asked.

“Are you sure you want to talk about this? I don't want to bother you with stupid stuff like this—”

“I'm listening,” I said.

“They don't admit it
was
anything but crystal H-two-oh.” She said it like this, deliberately, distancing herself from what she was saying and, oddly, giving it more force. She made no further reference to the way I sounded, to the fire. But she had never mentioned her pregnancy either.

“I have Polaroids,” I said. Matilda had them on file, three snapshots of water that looked like dark blue fountain pen ink.

“Truth issues aside,” said Stella.

“I can certainly understand that.” Even in sadness I could think like that, easy, minor concessions that were meaningless. “But isn't there a larger responsibility? How do they know it won't happen again?”

“I'll have a letter off to you in a couple of days, Richard. You might explain to your clients that time is of the essence in any proceeding. What's the use of big money ten years from now?”

“That's a very good point.” Meaning: we win.

“And I think we'll be talking settlement a few days from now,” said Stella.

“Matilda tells me you're—” Why is it difficult to say
pregnant?

“Very. It's a girl. You never wanted to go into criminal law, did you?”

“I did practice criminal law once, actually. When I was an innocent lad. I had a client who had languished in Santa Rita, a man who met a twelve-year-old girl through a pen pal service for convicts. Got out of jail, met the girl in a motel on University Avenue. She told him she was seventeen. There was a healthy list of charges against him, every variety of rape, plus assault.”

“Great moments in jurisprudence,” said Stella.

“The story is short, and not one I'm happy to be telling. The girl vanished, the DA didn't have a real case without her testimony. My client walked. I disliked him so much I swore to myself I would never handle a case like it, ever again. And I haven't.”

“I wondered why you paddle your canoe up and down such a backwater, real estate law. Aside from seeing yourself on television all the time. You going to run for senator or something?”

“Why not?” I meant it as a joke.

“We have to have a meeting on this other thing, that burglar alarm fiasco. I want to see you in person,” she said. “Lunch.”

I had taken the security alarm case on behalf of a retirement community, not one of the luxurious ones where retired surgeons drive golf carts down the middle of the street, but a simpler, plainer community in Daly City, elderly people with rooms too full of furniture. Stella was going to lose on that one, too. Maybe this was why she wanted to meet in person, put a little extra spin on the ball.

I carried the portable phone back to the package and examined the way the brown paper had been folded and sealed. To my surprise, the label was addressed to me. “Any time,” I said.

“Tomorrow.”

“What's the hurry?”

“Curiosity.”

Jesus, Stella Cameron was flirting with me. It was like being courted by the SS. Besides, I wasn't in the mood for any of this.

She said, “What I mean is—how are you and Connie?”

“It's too complicated to explain right now,” I said.

I opened the wrappings just a little, enough to be able to see. The brown paper tore easily enough, but it was sealed with the plastic, shiny, never-rip tape prized by delivery services.

“Remember when you thought we'd be partners?” she said.

What a mad thought
that
had been. “Years ago.”

I picked at the tape. What had begun as curiosity was becoming a matter of stubbornness. I fetched a pen knife from a side table, a mother-of-pearl-handled tool about the size of a switchblade.

“I always wondered when you'd get tired of Connie,” she said. “Or maybe vice versa.” Hormones, I thought. High on pregnancy, and pissed off because her clients couldn't keep copper salts out of the plumbing.

I carefully cut away some of the tape. It was this quality of stubbornness that made Stella a successful attorney. She lost cases, she won cases. She came back, like the flu. She asked, “What are all those little noises?”

“I'm opening a package.”

The paper peeled away, a wide corner of it. And there was my own, living image—hair uncombed, my chinos a little wrinkled, phone to my ear. My reflection stared back through a snowfall of black, unmoving flakes. I tore the paper all the way.

It was a mirror. The looking glass gave the room around me a yellowish tinge. I recognized this mirror.

Or perhaps I was mistaken. The frame was exceptionally hard wood, almost the tone and density of ivory, with worm holes here and there. A carved head surmounted the entire piece. A horse, I thought. Or, more accurately, a unicorn. Its horn had broken off, the break the same sienna hue as the rest of the frame.

I knew this mirror. I recognized it, but couldn't quite place it in my past. It had belonged somewhere in my earlier life, in a bedroom, or a rarely visted hallway. At some point it had vanished.

What made me do it? I saw it happen like a story in the slowly turning pages of a picture book. My hand stretched, it touched, it lingered.

Damn
. I withdrew my hand. I had cut myself on a crescent along one edge of the mirror, where the glass had broken and did not meet the frame. It was not a bad cut, but it stung.

I have always found mirrors mesmerizing, the way the plane answers the world with an image that seems just behind the surface of the mirror itself. The sweater tossed down on the chair behind my image was as far within the mirror as its twin, one of the cashmere pullovers Connie had given me, was behind the living, actual man. Thinking about mirrors always gave me intellectual vertigo.

I knelt to find the label. It was typed, an old-fashioned, lick-and-stick patch of paper with
from
and
to
preprinted. The return address portion was left blank.

“Richard, are you still there?”

I told her I was.

“Smoke inhalation can be very dangerous,” Stella said. “It can affect the way your brain works.”

I was bleeding. I sucked my finger. Just having the mirror in the room made the house more spacious, the air like early morning.

I chopped bell pepper. I thawed hamburger in the microwave. I was making a casserole, something from my days at Boalt Law School, a dish prized for bulk as well as flavor, something I thought would be soothing.

I called Connie's shop. I got her answering machine and hung up on it. I called my office and got my own machine, Matilda sounding a little seductive, as though leaving a message was a romantic moment in everyone's life. Maybe Connie had not been so foolish. Wrong, of course. But Matilda had a certain charm. I took the casserole out of the oven and let it cool. I flicked on the television, I turned it off. I turned on lights, I listened to music, Bach's organ fugues progressing like a convoy of battle cruisers.

When I turned off the classical music I heard the neighbor's guitar. He almost always kept the Gibson muted, in deference to the rest of us. But I liked the ragged, pensive chords. I once stopped by to pay him a compliment. He was a gangly nineteen-year-old, a computer trainee heading a group whose favorite number seemed to be something like “We Are the Blow Jobs.” His parents were on sabbatical in Israel. I told him that he was pretty good, and pointed out that he used the same brand of guitar as Chuck Berry. He grinned and told me not to ask him to play “Johnny B. Goode.” I grinned back and told him he could do worse; it was the quintessence of American rock & roll.

My young neighbor's music had taken a more and more tuneful turn, losing that ugly edge that made his former music so lively. But I was entranced by it, until the amplifier made a single electronic burp and the music stopped.

Now and then I passed before the mirror where it leaned against the living room wall. I could remember it now, or I thought I did. It looked much older, not only thirty years older, but a century old, as though the thing had been left out in weather, or buried.

I remember my parents referring to its absence. When it vanished from our lives one day my mother had said it was stolen. “Why they took it and nothing else is something we can marvel at and be thankful for,” said my mother. It was typical of her spoken pronouncements. There had always been something eighteenth-century about her speech, parallel structure and balanced sentences predominating, especially when she was nervous and more careful of her phrasing. “No doubt it was far more valuable than any of us imagined,” she had said.

It was very late before I realized that Connie was not coming home. I could take no further interest in the looking glass, despite my dull wonderment that an artifact from my early years could, on this wasteland of a day, suddenly reappear.