Contrary Motion

by Andy Mozina

  “Whitaker’s blaming me,” Cynthia says.

  “For what?”

  “He’s saying I had settlement authority, and everything should have been wrapped up before this happened.”

  “I thought it was over the limit.”

  “I think it was—plus I definitely had to cover myself because of how he’s been acting—but he never actually set hard-and-fast limits. He always says, ‘A good lawyer has good judgment.’ He resent me an email from before I went to Wichita that said, ‘I trust you to wrap this up,’ but we still had a pretty big range of settlement possibilities, some beyond what I could have authorized. He said his email was ‘explicitly empowering me’ to settle it on my own.” Cynthia is speaking extremely quickly. “I was just in his office. It was abso-fucking-lutely horrible. He was like, ‘If you want to be a partner, you can’t come running to someone every time you need to make a judgment as an attorney.’ ”

  She stops abruptly, and it takes me a while to figure out that the noises now coming through the phone are the sound of her crying. I’ve never heard her cry before.

  “Cynthia,” I say, “you didn’t do anything wrong. You emailed him the final terms two week ago. He was stonewalling you. He was messing with you!”

  “But it looks like I screwed up,” she struggles to say. “He’s such a manipulative bastard.” And she loses it again.

  “Let’s get you out of there,” I say. “Let me take you to lunch.”

  “I don’t have time for lunch!” she says in an uncharacteristically whiny voice. “I mean, I already ate…or maybe I didn’t. Oh my God.”

  “I know it’s hard,” I say. “Subtle and powerful manipulative bastards are the hardest manipulative bastards to deal with. But you’re a damn good lawyer, and he’s—”

  “I have so much fucking work to do. I thought I was on top of everything….”

  Dizziness seizes my head and swings my brain side to side. I clamber onto the futon couch, facedown with my cheek against the pillow, the phone against my free ear.

  “I’m sorry you’ve got to deal with this, Cynthia,” I say.

  We both go silent. After a good minute, I say, “Are you there?”

  “I am,” she says. “Better go. Thank you, Matt.”

  “I’ll call you tonight. Take care. I love you.”

  “Oh, sailor,” she says. “Love you too.”

  After we hang up, I keep still. I’ve got a bad headache and a constant urge to yawn, but lying here is not at all restful. Though we’ve signed emails to each other with “love,” neither of us has ever said “I love you” before. This was probably the wrong time to make such a momentous declaration, yet every particular of this moment brought it out of me. Maybe what I really meant is that I am aching with pain for her and want to support her, that I’m trying my hardest to love her right now. I’m surprised and gratified that she used the word, too, though yes, without attaching her first-person pronoun to it. Maybe if I can solve this buzz and win St. Louis, she’ll use her personal pronoun and we’ll move to some downstate town together, commuting distance to St. Louis but also a semi-reasonable drive up to Chicago for days with Audrey—maybe I could even afford to keep this apartment—and make a new, good life. Everything may be in doubt, yet everything can still work.

  —

  On Tuesday, when I pick up Audrey, I’m all over her, father-wise. The trick to conversing with her, it turns out, is asking very specific dumb questions: Did you make pictures of trains? Did anyone fly? Did you hear a story about penguins? Nothing turns on her words faster than the chance to clear up my misconceptions.

  After I finish bedtime reading, Audrey asks, “Is Steve going to be the boss of me?”

  “Well, you have to obey him,” I say. “Let’s put it that way.”

  She considers this.

  “Steve says Mama projects at me.”

  “Oh, sweetie, I don’t know what that means. You’re a good kid. You just concentrate on finishing first grade.”

  “Okay,” she says.

  —

  During my Wednesday rounds at Golden Prairie, Richard seems reasonably hale. I range into some classical repertoire, which he seems to prefer to the folk tunes his daughter Erin first suggested. Once you get used to the oxygen tubes going in his nose, the occasional, brink-of-choking cough, and the purple patches on his scaly, thin forearms, he seems like a regular old guy who could cheer on the Cubbies for years to come.

  Michael is sleeping when I poke my head in. Actually, he looks deceased. Until I’m within two feet of him, I’m not sure that his chest is still rising and falling. Once I see that it is, I think: I’m glad he’s alive; would it be better for him to be dead?; I’m glad I don’t have to play; I’m sad I don’t have to play; I feel guilty over my relief for not having to play.

  On my way out, Marcia nabs me to play for a woman who has been exclaiming “Help!” about every twenty seconds, mincing the nerves of all within earshot. When I play “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” she smiles and stops crying out. Her addled nurse walks me to the front door, vowing to make me a lifetime supply of any baked good I might admit to liking.

  In the evening, I meet Cynthia at a wine bar on Damen for a strategy-and-support session. We hash and rehash the politics of her situation. Now it’s probably too late to go to the compliance committee. She really needs a confidant in the firm, but, ironically, Whitaker was her confidant and to some extent she picked up his enemies by association. There are also a few tough old birds, pre–Title 9 tough, on some distant floors of the firm, whom she met seven years ago when she was rotating through different practice areas as a summer associate. But it’s a lot to dump on them after years of minimal contact. She doesn’t know whom she can trust. She knows it looks horrible to get into trouble mere months before her partner decision.

  “But didn’t you have good reviews before this?” I ask.

  “I thought I did,” she says, “but I’ve been thinking about that. Whitaker is a real strengths-and-weaknesses kind of guy. He’d say stuff like ‘Nobody’s perfect,’ like that’s not the expectation, but then he’d go ahead and put your imperfections in your review. ‘Let’s make this real, let’s grow’—he’d say shit like that. And you’d think, ‘Wow, this guy is really authentic.’ And now—voilà—there’s negative stuff for him to work with.”

  “But there were strengths, too, right?”

  “People ignore your strengths when you fuck up like this.”

  “You haven’t fucked up.”

  “I did fuck up. I knew this would happen. I knew from the beginning being a lawyer was wrong for me.”

  “Come on, Cynthia. You’ve got a great mind for law.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “It’s a compliment.”

  “It’s a front.”

  “What’s a front?”

  “I don’t know if I even want to make partner at this fucking place.”

  Cynthia flags down the waitress and orders yet another glass of merlot. She’s ignoring me again, which puts an edge in my voice:

  “Cynthia, for what? A front for what?”

  “Oh, I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m going out of my mind. I thought I was a normal person, but I can’t function in this bullshit world.”

  “Sure, sometimes it can feel that way. But, hey—”

  “Let’s do something different this weekend,” she says. “Maybe make a big dinner or something, have T.R. and Charles down.”

  Her eyes, which have been all over the place, swing onto mine and stay there.

  “If that’s what you need,” I say, looking back at her.

  “That’s definitely what I need.”

  This would cash out the whole day, and what I’d really like to do is to keep my good practice momentum going. In these situations with Milena, I would usually decide in favor of practice time.

  “All right,” I say. “That sounds good.”

  21

  PREPARATIONS FOR THE dinner take on mass
and gravity and our lives fall into orbit. Time gets bent, foreshortened: Saturday night is everything, and what lies beyond Saturday night (St. Louis, Milena’s nuptials, Audrey’s therapy, Whitaker, intercourse of whatever fucked-up kind) falls into the category of what’s outside the universe’s edge.

  Late Saturday morning, Audrey is lying on her bed watching Monsters, Inc. for the ten thousandth time when Cynthia pulls up in her Mini. Audrey and Cynthia have met just once before, on a snowy February day, when Cynthia came over on a Saturday afternoon and hung out until it was time to take Audrey up to her mother’s—a trip we made as a threesome. Audrey was wary and quiet, and Cynthia, either out of savvy or disinterest, didn’t pester Audrey with ingratiating questions. Audrey rewarded her by inviting Cynthia to the Lincoln Park Zoo with us sometime. Cynthia was charmed, but schedules have since conspired against this.

  Now Cynthia comes to the door carrying her Martha Stewart cookbook and wearing a black camisole top and a flower-print skirt that comes to just past mid-bare-thigh. Her arms and legs are defined in a braided-rope sort of way. Maybe she spent those three weeks in Colorado on a cross-country ski machine. I’m glad she wants a big dinner; I need her to go easy on herself.

  “Hey, girl, how are ya?” she calls to Audrey from the front door.

  “Hi,” Audrey says, smiling shyly.

  “Ready to go shopping?”

  “Okay,” Audrey says, though I know she’d rather continue watching her movie. On another day, this would be tantrum-worthy material, but Audrey isn’t pitching one today.

  Cynthia thinks it’s funny that we’re putting on a dinner for two gay men with a menu out of a Martha Stewart cookbook: balsamic-marinated skirt steak; cucumber, string bean, and olive salad; grated potato pancake; and the kicker, Martha’s Maypole Cake, which requires carpentry and pounds of cream-colored sprinkles and jellied citrus slices. Martha has been out of prison for over two years, but Cynthia has taken great delight in pointing out that her period of supervised release ended just two months ago. Apparently, one of her newly restored rights is the freedom to associate with known criminals, which Cynthia deems worth celebrating.

  The menu’s not too expensive until Cynthia buys four bottles of fancy red wine, an after-dinner brandy, and a six-pack of beer from a foreign land for yours truly. Then she insists on going to Crate & Barrel for a complete set of dinnerware for four. “This is on me,” she says in the checkout line. “It’s an audition gift,” she explains, as if this were a Hallmark-approved occasion.

  Having worked most Saturdays for years, Cynthia seems to relish playing hooky. Audrey’s been day-cared into a tendency to bond with any semi-reasonable adult, and soon she’s bounding around Cynthia like a puppy. Cynthia smiles at this, and, yes, I can’t help but picture us as a family.

  When we get back to the apartment, Cynthia runs up and down the back stairs to borrow things from T.R. With Audrey reabsorbed by the tube, Cynthia holds up potatoes to her eyes like binoculars, black olives to her breasts like nipples, stopping during our preparations to “feel me up,” as she puts it. Her excitement makes me happy, yet there’s also something over-the-top about it all, which puts a cloud in my blue sky.

  At three forty-five I have to run Audrey up to Milena’s place, while Cynthia stays and continues to prep.

  When I pull up to Milena and Steve’s house, Audrey says, “Can I ask you something?”

  I brace myself. “Sure thing,” I say.

  “When you go to St. Louis, can you buy me a present from there?”

  I laugh. “Definitely.”

  “Promise?”

  “Oh, yeah, for sure.”

  “Thanks, Daddy!”

  She jumps out of the car, runs up the steps, and through the door held open by Milena’s hand.

  —

  As I return through the back door, Cynthia is scurrying down the stairs from T.R’s. She says, “They agree: it’s beautiful out, let’s eat on T.R.’s deck.”

  I don’t remember the proposal but say, “All right.”

  “Wonderful!” She rushes into the dining room and fetches the flowers—white, pink, and blue blooms she bought for the table—and carries them upstairs.

  T.R.’s deck is on the level of his apartment, built on a platform that connects to the landing at the top of the back stairs. Cynthia sets the table while I follow the salad recipe, note for note.

  “Anything I can do to help?” Charles says, entering the kitchen.

  I’d really rather not put him to work or draw attention to the Martha Stewart cookbook on the counter, but the Maypole Cake recipe calls for the creation of eighty-four flower petals cut from jellied fruit slices, and with Cynthia flitting and gabbing, another hand would be good. So I give him the petal-shaped cutter Cynthia bought and the bags of jellied citrus and put him to work.

  He’s perfectly cooperative, which, of course, makes me attribute all the snarky things he says to his shtick. I’m pathetically vulnerable to his personality type: people who tease with an edge of meanness, so that when they’re nice to someone he or she feels accepted in a special way.

  “So, ready for your big audition?” he asks, taking great care with his citrus petals.

  “Not quite.”

  “What are your chances?”

  “Honestly, the odds are not good.”

  He drops a petal in the bowl. “Then why are you going?”

  “It’s my dream,” I say.

  “And you’ve done this before?”

  “Many times,” I say.

  His silence presses me just enough.

  “I’ve made audition finals with good orchestras twice,” I add. I can get pretty wound up talking about my chances, but for some reason with Charles I can’t resist. “In San Diego, I just blew it. It was my first finals, and I made a really dumb mistake in Romeo and Juliet, which is not a hard piece for me. I mean, I just sort of—unraveled.”

  “It happens.” Charles shrugs.

  “Then I got so prepared for Seattle it was scary.”

  “And?”

  “It was weird. I didn’t win.”

  “Why is that weird?” He smirks as he cuts another petal.

  “Well, I don’t know. But after they announced the winner, I ran into one of the judges—the retiring harpist, in fact. His name was Gottfried Barker, can you believe that?” Charles is unmoved. “Anyway, he’s a big Salzedo guy—basically, he plays in a different style than I play, more ornate—and he said to me, ‘Where was the joy?’ ”

  “Ah, you were trying too hard,” Charles says, finally looking up from his work.

  “Well, you have to push hard,” I say, trying not to sound defensive. “That’s not really the point.” The string beans are done steaming, and I start making a bowl of ice water to blanch them. The thought that I’ve been preparing for this dinner all day instead of practicing has not been good for my equilibrium, and this conversation isn’t helping. “See, the Salzedo people are into how your arms look, and you’ve got to pluck the string a certain way. They’re into seeming artful, basically.”

  “Mmm,” Charles says.

  “Actually, I was probably playing the best I’ve ever played back then. Right after Seattle I took fourth in the Israeli International Harp Competition—ten days in Tel Aviv. I know no one’s ever heard of it, but it’s basically the harp Olympics.”

  “That’s all pretty impressive,” Charles says. “I had you pegged as a pathetic loser.”

  I remember Seattle and Israel as the end of a stupefying two-year stretch in which I prepared like a madman to blot out the San Diego debacle. After it was over, Milena and I had gone into debt, and I was emotionally cracked—and then Milena decided that it was time we started a family.

  “That was seven years ago,” I say, and, as I put the warm beans into the ice water to chill, a wave of dizziness hits. I feel strange about lying down with Charles here and my dizziness spikes. The room pitches like a crazy-ass, funkadelic dance floor. I stagger to the bathroom, b
ouncing off doorjambs, and, just like that, I’m throwing up.

  “Oh dear, was it something I said?” Charles calls from the hallway. Then, his voice pitched a different way: “I’m afraid I’ve made your boyfriend sick.”

  —

  And I do feel better. It takes some explaining, but I manage to convince Charles and Cynthia that this is just audition nerves, two weeks early, nothing to be alarmed about. Charles accepts this diagnosis and prescribes many glasses of wine—or a twelve-pack of Old Style for people from Milwaukee. I lie down for about a half hour, just to get my bearings, but feel restless and find my way back to the kitchen, wondering if drinking may actually be the best way to let everything go for now.

  Cynthia shoos away Charles and finishes decorating the Maypole Cake while I perform the manly tasks of broiling the meat and frying the latkes. Together we plate up the food. I find it important to arrange it as much like the picture as we can. Then we carry it up to the deck, where T.R. and Charles sit in early-evening sunshine.

  “Lovely,” T.R. says as I put a plate in front of him, and that’s when I decide that this is going to be an extremely fun evening, all worries be damned.

  T.R., Charles, and Cynthia drink a lot of wine. I go with beer, the odd man out. My head turns from a solid into something more cloud-like, any lingering wisps of anxiety-driven nausea recede, and light and air please me to no end. Cynthia chatters as if T.R. and Charles are her long-lost friends. She hasn’t broken her happy stride all day. Charles has just landed an excellent job producing news segments at WGN, but he loves to tell stories about his demented ex-colleagues at the little vintage shop on Division where he used to work—a morass of substance abuse, cataclysmic relationships, and insider theft.

  “Our little boy is all grown up,” Cynthia says to T.R., and T.R. nods.

  Cynthia is joking but I sense real happiness and pride in T.R.’s nod. I get the feeling that Charles arrived at “T.R.’s Home for Wayward Boys” a little mixed up himself.