He Said, She Said

by John Decure

  Wendy Wideload.

  Wendy Ick.

  Wendy Glick-you-make-me-sick.

  Wendy I-wouldn’t-even-do-you-with-Herbie-Eisenberg’s-dick.

  Symptoms? They abounded.

  I started to pull my hair out a strand at a time. Had a quick enough wit with idiots like Robby, but when I was cornered, I’d get this horrible shortness of breath like I was choking.

  The school psychologist, Mrs. Burns, hated the sight of me and would tuck in her elbows whenever I came into her office on a hall pass. In her warped mind, she was all about self-sacrifice. But she was horrifically out of touch. In fact, almost every time I saw her, she’d tell me the same old horrifically out of touch story, how, when she was a high school senior herself and getting ready for homecoming, her ball gown didn’t quite fit right. So she’d taped her mouth shut at home to lose weight. And guess what? She was chosen as the class homecoming queen! Wow, what a heartwarming success story!

  You see the connection, I’m sure; according to Mrs. Burns, I was fat and moley and undesirable because my will was flawed, too weak.

  I didn’t want to be beautiful badly enough!

  All that unfeeling bitch gave me the will to do was die…

  Alprazolam… banana stand. My secret password…

  I hung in there pretty well at first under Ms. Aames’s questioning, but the more I tried to explain myself, the more the walls in the courtroom started to shrink in on me, as if I was the trash in a trash compactor and had to be—deserved to be—crushed. By the time the cross-examination started, nausea was building in my throat and I was fighting to keep my breathing even.

  Mr. Heidegger, a man whose jewels got squeezed in a vise every time Ms. Aames made a move, didn’t scare me one bit. But he was smart enough to keep pushing me deeper into that trash compactor.

  No, I did not steal this expert-witness assignment from Malcolm Flaherty. He bailed out on the state and went to Vienna. No, I did not read his expert report for this case. Was I supposed to?

  Would I—open my bag? What? Were these people insane?

  Ms. Aames was jumping up and down objecting, but the defense lawyer made an offer of proof—whatever that means—about how his associate had seen me in the witness room reading Malcolm’s report and that this raises a serious issue of bias on my part. I can’t read what I’ve never seen, I told the judge, but he looked at me as if he were stuck in a spot. So I agreed to open the bag… and there was Flaherty’s damn report, right on top of all my things. Dammit—I’d gone across the room for a cup of water from the dispenser and left my bag and just when I did, some woman came in the witness room and started engaging me, asking me if I knew how to get to an IRS office, showing me some piece of paper with an address on it. When I came back I remember thinking: oh, my bag’s zipped shut, not recalling it being closed like that.

  “Someone must’ve put it there, Your Honor. I swear, I’ve never laid eyes on it before.”

  The judge said, “Doctor, just answer the questions the best you can.”

  Did I know what Doctor Flaherty concluded? No. But let me guess. Doctor Fallon was the world’s greatest psychiatrist, bar none.

  Nobody laughed.

  They told me what Dr. Cut-n-Run said anyway. According to Malcolm, the patient appeared to be stalking Dr. Fallon after hours and the good doctor tried to befriend her, to be kind rather than report her to the police. She’d come onto him. His record-keeping was inadequate, as he’d failed to make notations describing this troubling development and he’d failed to refer her to another psychiatrist, someone who might help her with these obvious transference issues she was struggling with now.

  Two simple departures from the standard of care.

  Mashugana! What a bullshit finding! No wonder Malcolm was their man.

  I remembered asking Bradlee Aames the day we first met and ate a box of candy together, why she’d ever wanted such a limp noodle as Flaherty as an expert in the first damn place. She had told me first of all, she hadn’t chosen him, the board did. Somebody in Sacramento knew Dr. Don and was pulling strings for him, and Malcolm Flaherty was a marionette. But Ms. Aames said she’d figured out a way around the Malcolm problem. She was going to put him on the stand and then make him assume a different set of facts, one much closer to the truth about what happened. In that case, Malcolm would have to testify as I had, or look like a damn fool.

  But he’d deserted the case, and here I was.

  The one called Heidegger was staring at me.

  “We’re you just talking to yourself, Ms. Glick?”

  “Uh, if I was, I wasn’t aware of it.”

  “Did I just hear you say—forgive me your honor—that Doctor Flaherty’s opinions were ‘bullshit’?”

  My throat tightened up and like that, I was breathing through a pinhole deep in my throat.

  “I might have said that, yes. But only to myself.”

  “To yourself? I heard it too.”

  “Bully for you, sir.”

  “That doesn’t seem like a very objective way to assess the opinion of a colleague, Ms. Glick. But you don’t like Doctor Flaherty, do you?”

  “It’s not that I don’t like the man. He’s just—well, Malcolm.”

  “Didn’t you, at a holiday party last year attended by several doctors in your practice—”

  “We share suite space, Mister Heidegger. They’re not my medical partners. I’m a sole practitioner.”

  Heidegger smiled as if I was entertaining him just by offering an answer.

  “Yes, well, didn’t you, at a party, call Doctor Flaherty a vulgar name and throw a glass of wine on him?”

  “No. He came up behind me and made a tasteless joke.”

  “What kind of joke?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “If you recall, please answer,” the judge said.

  “He made a joke about hiding out behind the barn. Me being the barn, that is.”

  The judge had stopped typing and was shaking his head as if to say: Why do I have to listen to crap like this?

  “But he startled me,” I said. “Bumped me in the elbow, and my wine spilled.”

  “Isn’t it true that you physically attacked Doctor Flaherty?”

  “No. Do I look to you like a person who routinely commits assaults?”

  It sounded like a good counterpunch but I could barely breathe. The sweat was cascading off my forehead. I may as well have been hacking through a rainforest with a machete. Which is how I felt, trying to defend myself against this stupidity.

  “What I mean is that I did nothing of the sort.”

  Lawyer Heidegger asked the judge if he could approach, and when the judge said yes, Heidegger glided over to Ms. Aames and handed her a document. Then he approached me with another piece of paper. Showed it to me. Told the judge it was a restraining order. Filed just days ago, before Malcolm had gone to Vienna.

  I said I’d never seen it. The judge looked at me quizzically.

  “You’re not objective, Ms. Glick,” Heidegger accused me.

  “Sorry, I’m not following you, sir.”

  “You’ve got a vendetta against the state’s other expert witness, their original expert.”

  “He’s just a man to me, a colleague. Maybe one curiously lacking in moral fiber, but I really don’t care, that’s his problem.”

  “You’d do anything to show him up, to prove him wrong.”

  Then the lawyer held up a copy of Flaherty’s report like he might swat a fly with it.

  “Wrong. This isn’t about Doctor Flaherty,” I said.

  The walls, they kept tightening, and all the air in the room began to corkscrew in on my temples, making me see stars.

  “Let’s discuss the medications you’re taking.”

  “Wha… hold on.”

  “Currently.”

  “Nothing, nothing at all.”

  “—side effects.”

  “You’re dirty tricksters,” I practically yelled, but I couldn’t
breathe and barely a sound came out of my mouth. When that happened I started to get lightheaded and the air kept corkscrewing in on me, which made the room tilt and start to spin, and like that I was in a bad spell. I was in a black-and-white hell… Dorothy in that ratty old house, except I wasn’t beautiful Judy Garland, I was Big Ballast, the gargoyle-ish Wendy Glick; that house kept on spinning, and it was only a time before it hit the ground, and I had to get out of it before it crashed.

  They brought in paramedics, two nice young men who let me breathe from an oxygen bottle until I could sit up. About half an hour later, I told the judge I could continue. Insisted, despite his skepticism. Mr. Heidegger made a calculated goodwill gesture by saying he was finished with his questions.

  “I think the witness has said quite enough,” he told the judge. As if I’d been the one holding a shovel to dig the hole I’d fallen into.

  “Redirect, Ms. Aames?” the judge asked. He seemed a touch intimidated by her physical presence just like all the other men, even from his privileged perch.

  “Yes, thank you,” she said. Then she smiled at me as if to say she trusted me enough, at least, that I could hold up under a little more scrutiny. Well, all right, I thought, my confidence suddenly spiking.

  She asked me a few questions which I found easy to handle.

  “You never saw the report, Mr. Flaherty’s report, the one that was in your bag?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Since you came to court, was there any time your bag was left unattended?”

  “Yes, when I was in the witness waiting room. I went to get a drink of water and left it by the chair I’d been sitting in. I just remembered something, earlier, when I was being asked about this phantom report. As soon as I stepped away, this woman came sidling up to me, asking for directions to the IRS, sticking a piece of paper in my face so I couldn’t see my purse.”

  “It was… a ruse?”

  “Well, yeah. Even I know this is a State of California building, it says so all over the lobby downstairs. The IRS, they’re federal.”

  I just couldn’t help myself and glared at Dr. Don, that slimy defense lawyer and the other stiff suits at the table over there, the whole sorry bunch of schmucks.

  “The woman wasn’t even a good liar. They stuffed that report into my bag when I wasn’t looking.”

  “Objection, speculation,” said Heidegger.

  “I’ll allow it,” the judge responded without looking up. He looked tired of the whole subject, and Ms. Aames took his cue and moved on, handing me a copy of the restraining order I’d never laid eyes on.

  “No, I said, I’d never been served with this order.”

  “You have a suite on the same floor of the offices at 6220 Santa Monica Boulevard, correct?”

  I looked right at the judge, with his natty gray beard, and answered yes.

  “So, if this restraining order requires you to keep away, you wouldn’t be able to access your office without violating the order, would you?”

  “That’s right. I’d be out of business. Which means, now that I’ve finally seen this, I’ll have to retain legal counsel to get rid of it.”

  “Do you recall that first time I met you?”

  “Yes, in my office.”

  “Do you know how that meeting came about?”

  “Sure. Malcolm—Doctor Flaherty—he came to my office, trying to duck your visit with him.”

  “Pardon me?” the judge said.

  “I mean, Your Honor, he was hiding from Ms. Aames here, said he didn’t want to testify ’cause he was leaving for Europe—”

  “Objection, hearsay, move to strike!” Mr. Heidegger shouted.

  “I’ll allow it,” the judge said, and boy, did he look disgusted. He told me I could go ahead and finish my answer.

  “So, I’ve actually done Doctor Flaherty a favor by substituting in on this case, since his sudden departure to a conference in Europe.”

  “Have you ever attacked Doctor Flaherty?”

  “No, I am not a violent person. At all. I’m the type who gets bullied, not the other way around. I do, though, intend to call my lawyer, Mr. Abel Levine, to inquire about suing the pants off Doctor Flaherty.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because this declaration of his ought to be written on toilet paper. It’s pure libel.”

  “Do you have anything to add to your testimony today?” Ms. Aames asked me.

  I took a breath, resting my palms in my lap, thinking: Wow, this was tougher than I imagined, dealing with the pressure of all this testy Q-and-A without any meds. I saw my father’s face back when I was a child, the way he wouldn’t look at me when we were at Temple and he’d be talking with Rabbi Shenkman, bragging about his wonderful family, everyone except me. I’d become a doctor just to show him, just to prove my worth to him. Hah!—he didn’t even come to the graduation. UCLA, way out west, on the coast, so far to fly on a plane, he always got cramps, sitting all those hours in one tight space, and the doc, his cardio specialist, he said it wasn’t good for his circulation. And should we even discuss the parking in Westwood? Fuggedaboudit.

  Robby Valderi was still inside my head, after all these years, taunting me.

  Wendy Glick-you-make-me-sick.

  Yeah? Well you can kiss my full-figured ass, Robby.

  Given the final word, I knew what I had to do.

  “One thing I didn’t get to say, Ms. Aames, is how sorry I am, to you and—”

  I nodded at the judge.

  “—to you, Your Honor, about that, uh, little problem I had. Anxiety attacks are like relatives from out of town, they always come along at the most inopportune time.”

  The judge smiled, and a wave of relief hit me.

  “And I want to apologize for making a spectacle in the courtroom. Not my intention.”

  “It was a medical emergency, Doctor Glick,” the judge said graciously. “I’m relieved you’re fine now.”

  Man, why can’t I ever hook up with a guy like this: a professional man, smart, kind, successful, nice natty beard? Oh yeah, because I’m Wendy Glick, the scary chick…

  “Thank you, Your Honor. One other thing, if I might. Just… people? I think we’re all pretty vulnerable. My buttons got pushed and there I was, on the floor gasping for air. Mrs. Loberg? Now, she had a lot of buttons that could be pushed, quite a few, indeed.”

  I turned my gaze on Donald Fallon and pointed, no jabbed, a fat finger—bam! like I was poking him, and Robby Valderi, and Flaherty, and Mr. Heidegger, and every other prick who’d taken pleasure in picking on a fat moley Jewish girl who made just about the easiest target in the world, right in the eye.

  “Her psychiatrist? He knew, he knew where every one of those buttons was located,” I said. “If you decide that he did it, Your Honor, you know, that he sexually exploited that poor woman, well, I’m sure you’ll never know the reason why, ’cause I’m also sure he’ll deny the whole thing.”

  Heidegger started to object but I kept right on talking and he shut up.

  “But if he did it, I can tell you as a psychiatrist myself, it was simple. I know life isn’t fair. All I’ve gotta do is look in the mirror to remind myself of that. But some things ought to be very, very fair. Telling your problems, your deepest, darkest secrets to a therapist who’s supposed to be looking out for your best interests, that has to be even-steven, fifty-fifty.”

  I leveled a long stare across the room one last time.

  “I’m not here because a weak-willed colleague had to jet off to Vienna. I’m here because what that man did was wrong.”

  The judge typed quietly. Ms. Aames said she had nothing further—which was good, because I sure felt the same. Mr. Heidegger, he consulted a legal pad as if it were an oracle, and the rest of us waited, the sweat tingling down my many broad slopes and sliding into deep crevasses unseen by human eyes in decades. Apparently Mr. Heidegger had run out of mean-lawyer pills, but he scoffed, staring down the thin slope of his nose at me once more, for old time�
��s sake, before he passed on asking any more questions.

  I patted one hand in my lap with the other, sighing happily. The court-reporting gizmo was stone still, and I watched the gizmo-operator check the condition of a nail on her third finger. I smiled, and she smiled back. Sure, sure—I suspected the reporter, who’d done a bang-up job thus far of never making eye contact with the hideous blob on the witness stand was merely displaying a perfunctory courtroom courtesy; I get that, and I wasn’t offended. See, I had reason, a real reason, to be happy: the courtroom wasn’t spinning like that ratty old black-and-white house.

  Hey, Wendy, I said to myself. Hey, Big Ballast. Way to go. You are officially over the rainbow.

  Best day I’ve had in I don’t know how long…

  21

  DESHAUN FELLOWS

  Dr. Glick had a handicap parking pass because of her weight most likely. So Ms. Aames and I got her out of the old Broadway building and over to her car pretty quick, nearest spot in the lot corner of Fourth and Hill. It was a white Honda minivan, almost new and as we helped Dr. Glick pile into the front seat, she explained how she’d picked this car because it had no center console and she could spill herself over toward the middle pretty easy and still be comfortable. Cheerful lady, thankful for the steadying hand I gave her—and leaning over at the last minute to me, asking in a whisper how’d I think she did, testifying and all, notwithstanding the “medical downturn.”

  Myself, still speaking in my most formal voice, being in a courtroom so many hours, I told her: “You did well, quite well, in my opinion. Judge was eating out of your hand, ma’am, any fool could see that. And there may have been a few of those in attendance, so there you have it.”

  She and Ms. Aames laughed. Then the doc got serious again, asked both of us what we thought, about the anxiety attack, the meltdown that came later. What it might’ve done to affect her credibility.

  I lied first, told her it only made her more human. Ms. Aames said she agreed.

  But in truth, it was a scary thing, seeing her laid out like that, couldn’t even breathe, like a fish out of water. Lady had some fight in her, coming back the way she did, keep on keepin’ on, like the Curtis Mayfield song goes. But that shit was scary.