The Testimony

by Laura London

  “After the manner of Bernstein off to interview Deep Throat.” Jesse’s voice came from just over her shoulder. “Is it only Harry?”

  She looked again. “No. There’s another car pulling up with that young guy from the wire service. Ben…”

  Jesse’s lips carried the ghost of a smile. “Mittman. Let’s drop hot oil on them from the battlements. Remind me sometime to find an honest way of making a living. Christine?” His expression had become soft and searching. He took her hand. “You look terrified. Someone hasn’t been taking very good care of you for six months.”

  Her gaze met and held his in a moment of sparkling sweetness. “Don’t worry about me,” she said softly. “Take care of yourself. When you’re all right, I’m all right.”

  Solace bloomed in the light-green eyes. He lifted her hand, slowly spread her fingers, and kissed her palm. “Then I’ll try extra hard to be all right.” Releasing her, he started toward the front door, but halted as though some fleeting, potent thought had touched him. He turned. “Straighten my tie.”

  He wasn’t wearing one. Christine felt her heart quicken. It was a long-standing joke between them, something to cling to, a symbol that said lightness was not a thing they would let disappear from their lives. In mime, she studied the absent tie with the formality of a valet, made infinitesimal adjustments to the knot-that-wasn’t-there, tugged fussily on his collar, and flicked invisible particles of lint from his jacket. Standing back with one eye closed, the other eyebrow in an exaggerated arch, she viewed her handiwork over an upraised thumb, like an artiste. “Nah, wait a minute.” She reached up, grinning, to rumple his hair. In a tone that suggested she was immensely pleased with herself, she said, “There,” and kissed her fingers to his tousled hair.

  Instead of flashing the answering smile she had expected, he pulled her into his arms and held her tightly, whispering something into her hair that was too low for her to catch. After a moment he left her, without speaking again, to face his media colleagues waiting outside. Christine sat down on the couch, trying to rub the headache from her temples and the leftover tears from her eyes. When that failed, she climbed the creaking oak stairs to the bathroom and scrubbed her face. As she flipped through her closet, randomly dragging clothes from hangers, she discovered that her hands were shaking.

  She dressed in a shetland crew-neck sweater, a shirt, and wool slacks, then decided they made her look as if she’d stepped out of the pages of a preppie handbook. Ugh. The clothes came off in a heap. She eyed the Ralph Lauren suit her mother had brought back for her from New York. No. Every press report of Jesse’s case referred to her as his “wealthy socialite wife.” The last thing she wanted to do was reinforce that image. Not only was it patently untrue, but it made her feel like the kind of strange social category that college freshmen studied in survey courses—the Luddites, the Hittites, the Socialites. When the Chicago Daily Post covered Jesse’s case, their reporter had misread the wire service rip, and she had been mentioned as his wealthy socialist wife. Jesse had burst out laughing and then written the Post a scathing letter in protest. Personally, she was convinced that somewhere in the steamy depths of Washington, D.C., her name was now on file in an FBI office.

  Going outside, finally dressed in a long gray sweater that was ruffled around the neckline and a comfortably long wool voile skirt, Christine found their small front lawn busier than feeding time at the zoo. Television cameras nosed around near the front door, their short proboscises poking curiously here and there like rooting aardvarks. Reporters milled, chatting to Jesse and to one another with the gossipy intimacy of confederates. Not, of course, that they wouldn’t have run one another into a ditch to get the scoop on a story, but they were obviously feeling a little silly about interviewing one of their own kind. Neighbors were beginning to appear, descending the steep front lawns of hefty Revival-style houses. Those who considered themselves too sophisticated to stare made themselves busy raking leaves or taking swipes at their winter-ravaged hedges with clippers.

  Not the Crosbys. A husband and wife team of attorneys, they lived directly across the street and drove the house-proud of the neighborhood into a frenzy by refusing to mow their lawn, under the sardonic claim that they were letting it return to prairie. Just now they were set up on the sidewalk in lawn chairs to watch the goings-on, with stadium blankets, binoculars, and scotch. They saluted Christine gaily with their glasses when they caught her wave and shouted, “It’s a happening!” Their kids were putting up a lemonade stand.

  With the panting vigor of two sheep dogs, the young Action News cameraman and Harrison P. Fosdick herded Jesse from the mob. The cameraman stopped to inspect the dial of the pack underneath his arm.

  “There isn’t much charge left in these batteries,” he said.

  Fosdick frowned. “You should have checked that before we left. Oh, for the days of film…”

  “When men were men,” Jesse murmured.

  “Beg pardon?” said Fosdick, turning.

  “Nothing.” Jesse smiled. “I’m ready whenever.”

  “Thanks. I’m gonna ask you to sit tight for a second here while I put in my intro.” Fosdick threw Jesse a curiously glazed smile and bared his teeth at the cameraman. “There had better be juice enough in that pack of yours for this interview.” Stationing himself about ten feet from the camera, Fosdick shook out the microphone cable and clipped the tiny cylindrical mike to his lapel. Straightening, he scowled, then nodded to the cameraman, then gazed sincerely into the camera. He began to walk forward, speaking in a booming baritone.

  “It is to this quiet East Side Milwaukee neighborhood that journalist Jesse Ludan returned today a free man. Jailed six months ago… ah, shit.” He’d tripped on the cable, sending the mike leaping downward to bounce off the top of one of his wing-tipped oxfords. He swept it up, glaring fiercely, and caught the grin Jesse wasn’t tactful enough to hide. “You print guys don’t have to worry about this stuff,” he chided, reestablishing himself in front of the camera and becoming sincere again. “Okay.” A pause.

  “It is to this quiet East Side Milwaukee neighborhood that journalist Jesse Ludan returns today a free man. Jailed six months ago for refusing to give testimony before a John Doe investigation of an antinuclear demonstration last summer, Ludan and his case have become a cause célèbre, drawing international support and media attention…”

  Christine heard the words, but she was watching Jesse’s face, remembering the nights she had carried grocery bags full of letters to Jesse’s parents’ house. They and his brothers had sat with her around the kitchen table wreathed in the warmth of their wood-burning stove as they tore open envelopes and wrote answers until two o’clock in the morning. Not everything that came in the mailbox had been friendly. Some disagreed politely. Some were derisive. Some were much worse. Jesse’s mother had said wasn’t it a shame that there were such twisted people in the world, and Jesse’s older brother Sandor began to insist on screening her mail. None of them had revealed any of this to Jesse, though he often asked. There would have been nothing for him to do about it but go insane with worry.

  Media attention. There had been a network clip she had never seen of Jesse’s father and her father escorting her from the courthouse on the day Jesse was jailed, her face white and streaked with the silver weave of falling tears, her eyes shut in pain.…

  Jesse, speaking to the camera, was saying, “There’s nothing complex about the issue. The components of a free press are reporters who aren’t afraid to tell a story and citizens who aren’t afraid to talk to reporters. If things people say to the press can become criminal evidence against them, people are going to learn not to talk to the press.”

  Fosdick leaned closer in a listening posture. “Could you explain why you think criminals have the right to that kind of shield?”

  “Could you explain why, in a nation that assumes innocence until conviction, you would stick a label like ‘criminal’ on people who’ve never been convicted of a crime?” J
esse snapped with such sudden impatience that Fosdick’s head jerked back in surprise. “If you understand the Constitution, you’ll understand that I went to jail to defend innocent men and women, not criminals.”

  Disregarding the microphone—Christine suspected he was going to feed this little incident into the tape eraser anyway—Fosdick said curtly, “That’s semantics, Ludan.”

  “Is it? Too damn bad you don’t know the difference between semantics and principles.” But as soon as the words left him, his expression began to change, and Christine felt her heart contract as she saw his surprise mirror Fosdick’s. She watched the man she loved as he brought his hand to his forehead and closed his eyes, rubbing gently. She knew the gesture. It meant utter exhaustion. The busy front yard grew quiet, alert with mute interest.

  Jesse lifted a palm toward Fosdick. “Harry…”

  With wary sympathy, Fosdick forestalled explanation or apology. “Hey, forget it, pal. Now that I know what kind of hand we’re playing, I’ll deal ’em easy, okay? Are you willing to give it another shot?”

  Jesse dropped his hand and looked around, his light-green eyes searching until they found and settled on Christine. His shoulders relaxed and he turned a strained smile back to Fosdick and nodded.

  Several others had followed the direction of Jesse’s gaze to where Christine stood in the shadowed overhang of the porch. One gave his camera a suggestive boost.

  “Chrissie!” the cameraman called. “I didn’t see you hiding up there. Come on down and let us get some shots of you and Jesse in a happy clinch.” He laughed at the strongly negative shake of her head. “Still camera-shy, eh? Well, I’d still rather expose a few feet of tape on your pretty face than Jesse’s any day of the week.”

  Stray male compliments embarrassed her, but rigorous early training from her mother had taught her never to deny them.

  “They call me the Mo Dean of the civil disobedience circuit,” she said.

  “Modine. Isn’t that a town in Illinois?” Fosdick’s eyes widened perplexedly, spider monkey style.

  “That’s Moline,” someone said. That drew laughter, then more banter, and questions for her and for Jesse, who had retreated into calm, concise answers. It was all in the line of duty. If you went to jail for six months, you sure as heck wanted to make people understand why, even if you were so tense you could hardly unfreeze your mouth to speak. As soon as Christine could, she said she heard the phone and escaped into the house.

  She tried to give it half an hour—in the line of duty. But in fifteen minutes her resolution snapped, tumbling silently around her like a broken kite string. She went back into the front yard to tell Jesse in a perfectly normal voice that his father was on the phone. He nodded, said, “Excuse me” to the clustered journalists, and followed her back inside with long strides. He picked up the receiver and listened to the dial tone. His eyes held amusement and light curiosity as they strayed to Christine’s face.

  “It’s the bee,” she said, answering his unspoken question. The bee: their private idiom for the dial tone’s hum.

  He smiled slowly and set down the phone. “It’s not going to work, you know. They’ll camp on the sidewalk, and hide in the garbage cans—”

  “—their beady eyes peering out of the darkness from under the lids,” Christine finished. “My fault. Indy offered to come and talk to them so we wouldn’t have to face them today, but I thought… I don’t know, that you’d talk to them on the courthouse steps or something.”

  “My fault. I ought to have the emotional ballast to evict them gracefully.” His right hand found her shoulder, his fingers working their way through the warm curtain of her hair, curving softly around the back of her neck. His gaze touched her eyelashes, her lips, the light play of color in her cheeks. Without breaking contact, he stretched one arm down, cradled the receiver, and dialed the numbers.

  She dropped her head back into the slow massage of his fingers. Pleasure pulsed through her shoulders and fanned through her throat, spreading downward, tightening her nerves. Jesse spoke into the phone.

  “Could you give me the number of the Wisconsin Ballet Company, please? Thanks.” He dialed again. “Yes. I’d like to speak to Indy Ludan, please.… Yes, I know that, and I’m sorry about the interruption but…”

  The steady stirring movements worked upward, tracing her spine and then dropping, slipping open the single button that closed her sweater.

  “Tell him it’s his brother. Right. Jesse. Thank you very much, I’m glad to be home too. Sure, I’d appreciate that. I’ll hold.”

  The fingers moved under her sweater and impelled her slightly forward until she could feel his body against her. Her thin skirt permitted the firm impression of his hips. Her chest cushioned achingly against his. The open lapels of his jacket fell in a teasing pressure on the sides of her breasts. Throughout her body, dormant neurons began to awaken, to search out the familiar print of his hard contours, the stretch of his thighs, the linear symmetry of his ribs.

  Jesse’s conversation with his brother was short. Dropping the phone on the hook, he said, “Indy’s on his way. Lord knows what he’s going to tell them.”

  “Glib stuff,” she started to say, but the phone and the doorbell rang together, the two sounds bitingly out of pitch. Though his body remained motionless, she could feel the tension that ran through his muscles. “We don’t have to stay in here, do we? Let’s escape,” she said.

  He understood her instantly. “Out the back? Let’s go.”

  A bubble of exhilaration rose in her as he grabbed her hand and ran with her through the house, out the back door.

  The back garden breathed color. A gardener for the county park system had owned the house before them, and his plantings smiled on. Massed tulips grew straight and tall in shades of gold, cherry-red, and lemon-yellow with a band of creamy white. Tiny lilac-pink bells of wood hyacinths pealed in sweet, silent harmonies under the melodies of songbirds. Fresh grass threw upward the wet loamy fragrance of spring and silenced the faint sound of their running feet.

  White picket fences, or hedges not fully in leaf, separated the pretty string of backyards. Two fences away a red station wagon with the logo of a radio station on its front door was driving slowly down the side street. The driver saw them, made a sharp stop, shouted a greeting out the window, and gunned the wagon in reverse, heading toward the alley that lined the backyards where the garages formed neat, unpretentious rows.

  Jesse stopped. “The goblins are circling. That’s Angela Currie.”

  She knew. That face she could recognize at five hundred feet because she’d seen it so often in the past gazing invitingly into her husband’s green eyes. Angela was young, talented, glowing with personality, and had the tenacity of a pit bull.

  “Jarochs are gone,” Christine offered, glancing at the surgically neat yard next door.

  “Do you want to make a break for it? Let’s bust out of this joint. The jailbreak of my dreams.” He put himself neatly over the picket fence into the Jarochs’ backyard and held out his arms to her. “C’mon over the big wall. Watch out for the searchlights—the bulls may have a piece trained on us. My, oh, my!” he said, watching her hitch her skirt up and prepare to leap into his arms. “This is more fun than I expected.”

  His hands caught her at the waist and lifted her, and, because she was a dancer, she knew how to make that easy for him. For six months there had been no Jesse to lift her over hurdles, to tease, to tempt, to laugh with. The unhealed residue of that stark emptiness clustered in her chest while her body swept his fleetingly. He settled her before him with care. Pain and the fluttery pleasure of his closeness rippled together, and she wanted only to feel his love, to have him fold himself around her like a mist and consume the memories of her suffering. And in some ways his smile did that as he pulled her into the sanctuary of the Jarochs’ lilac bush.

  “Jesse?” Angela’s too-musical soprano came from behind them. The back gate creaked sharply in their own garden. “Oh, Mr.
Lu-dan…” In an undertone, “Well, damn it, where did he go?” The high heels reached their patio and continued off around the corner of the house toward the front, tapping a demanding tone on the antique bricks.

  Christine took one look at Jesse crouching beside her, his face haloed by lilac leaves, and they collapsed against each other in silent laughter, caught like children in an electric moment of total irresponsibility.

  “That woman is trespassing,” Christine whispered.

  “We should call a cop. If they throw her in jail, I can do a story on her. Are you sure the Jarochs aren’t home?”

  “Positive. They left for the lake this morning. Would I have entered this sacred preserve else?” She put a hand on his arm, correcting a small dip in her balance.

  “Right. Or he’d try to force us to borrow his fertilizer spreader. Look, it ill befits our dignity to hide here under a bush. Instead I think we should hide in the toolshed. Do they still keep the key over the door frame?”

  With exaggerated stealth, they crept to the Jarochs’ small outbuilding and let themselves furtively inside, tiptoeing like cartoon burglars. Gasping with laughter, bent over the doorknob, she said, “This is so immature.”

  But Jesse had stopped laughing. He stood against the wall near the coil of a green garden hose, eyelids lowered, his cheekbones a sharp statement in a remote countenance, as though all stimuli had suddenly become a burden. Then he opened his eyes and brushed his hand briefly down her cheek.

  “Thanks.” His tone was quiet, his half smile made with effort.

  Effort also made her answer light. “For what? Skulking through the shrubbery like an idiot? For you, kid, anything.” No. No. This wasn’t Jesse—the lapses of mood, the flares of temper. Her mind rebelled, rejecting it. The stress of prison, the swift transition from bars to media stardom to home—she must be crazy to put him under a microscope today of all days. Easy, Chris. Love him. Just love him.