by Scott Turow
The therapists have had no end of theories why. He is the only child of two only children and came up in a hothouse of parental attention that may well prove there is such a thing as loving a child too much. Then there was the trauma of my indictment and trial, when no matter how we pretended, our family dangled like a movie character clinging to a broken bridge.
The explanation I go to most often is the one that leaves me least to blame: He inherited some of his mother's depressive disorder. By the time he had reached adolescence, I could see the familiar black funk descend on him, marked by the same brooding and isolation. We went through all the stuff you would expect. Report cards marked by A pluses and F's. Drugs. It was perhaps the most shamed day of my life when my pal Dan Lipranzer, a detective who was on the eve of his retirement to Arizona, popped into my chambers unexpectedly a decade ago. 'Drug Task Force picked up a drippy-nosed kid who goes to Nearing High yesterday and he says he's buying his poppers from the son of a judge.'
The good news was that this development allowed us to leverage Nat back into psychotherapy. When he began on SSRIs near the end of college, it was as if he had left a cave and come into the light. He started grad school in philosophy, finally moving out of the house for good, and then, with no discussion with us, made the change to law school. My son has been the living receptacle of so much anxiety and longing for both Barbara and me that we each seem startled at times that he is finally making his way on his own, but that probably has to do with the uneasiness of being left face-to-face with each other.
"Were you happy he went to law school?" Anna asks.
"Relieved in a way. I didn't mind grad school in philosophy. I thought it was a worthy enterprise. But I didn't know where it was going to lead. Not that law school made it much better. He talks about being a law professor, but it's going to be hard for him to do that straight from a clerkship, and he doesn't seem to have other ideas."
"How about a J. Crew model? You realize the guy's gorgeous, don't you?"
Nat is lucky enough to resemble his mother, yet the truth, which only I seem to recognize, is that the piercing quality to his handsomeness, the acute blue eyes and the universe of somber mystery, comes straight from my father. Young women are drawn like a beacon by Nat's exceptional good looks, but he has always been unnaturally slow to form a bond and has entered yet another remote phase as the result of a disastrous breakup with Kat, the girl he saw the last four years.
"They offered him a job. Somebody from an agency saw him on the street. But he's always hated people talking about his looks. It's not the basis he wants to be judged on. Besides, there's a better career if he wants to make easy money."
"What's that?"
"Everybody your age. You can all be rich beyond your wildest dreams."
"How?"
"Learn to remove tattoos."
She laughs as Anna laughs, as if laughing is all there is to life. She squirms and giggles. But the talk of Nat has left something lingering with her, and she rises to an elbow a few minutes later to see me.
"Did you ever want a daughter?" she asks.
I stare for quite some time. "I think that's the kind of remark that Nat would have called 'deliberately transgressive' in his grad school days."
"You mean out of bounds?"
"I think that's what he means."
"I don't think boundaries cut a lot of ice around here," she says, and nods to the walls of the hotel room. "Did you? Want a daughter?"
"I wanted to have more children. Barbara had all kinds of excuses: She could never love another child as much as Nat. Stuff like that. In retrospect, I think she knew she was sick. And fragile."
"But did you want a daughter?"
"I already had a son."
"So yes?"
I try to cast my mind back to the yearnings of those years. I wanted children, to be a father, to do better than was done to me-it was a dominating passion.
"I suppose," I answer.
She stands and slowly sheds the robe she has put on for warmth, letting it fall from her shoulders as she fixes me with a longing gaze I used to see in her last days working in my chambers.
"That's what I thought," she says, and lies down beside me.
Leaving Anna, when we meet at night, remains difficult. She begs me not to go and is not above the tactics of a jezebel. Tonight she dresses reluctantly, and as we approach the door, she places both hands on it and gyrates her back end at me like a pole dancer.
"You're making it hard to leave."
"That's the idea."
She keeps up this lewd little shimmy, and I plant myself against her and join the motion, until I am fully aroused. I abruptly raise her skirt, pull aside her underpants, and push myself inside. No rubber: a daring act by our terms. Even the first time, Anna had condoms in her purse.
"Oh, Jesus," she says. "Rusty."
But neither of us stops. Her hands are braced against the door. Every bit of the desperation and insanity of our relationship is here for both of us. And when I finally release, it seems to be the truest moment we've had.
Afterward, we are both a bit shaken and re-dress in chagrined silence.
"Teach me to shake my ass at you," she says as I leave first.
Guilt is a commando who arrives in stealth and then sabotages everything. After that brief moment of abandon, I am visited perpetually by obvious fears. I nearly weep late at night when I receive one of Anna's cryptic e-mails. "Visitor arrived," it says, using the quaint Victorian slang for menstruation. But even after that, there is an acronym that feels like a frozen hand squeezing my heart, whenever it comes to mind: STD. What if Anna, who is well traveled, is unknowingly afflicted with something I could pass on? I repeatedly envision Barbara's face when she comes home from the gynecologist.
I know this concern is largely irrational. But the what-ifs are each like nails driven into my brain. There is so much torment already that I simply cannot cope with yet another random worry. So one day in my chambers, I put the search term-"STD"-in my computer and find myself at a site. I make the 800 call from a pay phone in the bus station, with my back turned so nobody can hear.
The young woman at the other end is patient, consoling. She explains the testing protocol and then says she can charge my credit card. The initials that would appear on the bill would be innocuous, but it is the kind of detail that would never sink below Barbara's attention; she always asks whether any unexplained expense is deductible.
My silence says it all. The polite young woman then adds, "Or if you'd rather, you may pay with a postal money order or a cashier's check." She gives me a PIN that will supplant my name in all my dealings with the company.
I buy the cashier's check the next day when I am at the bank, making one of my jiggered deposits. "Should I list you as remitter?" the teller asks.
"No," I say, with embarrassing speed.
I go straight from there to the thirtieth-floor office in a Center City building where I have been told to drop the check. I find myself at the door of an import/export concern. I peek in, then back out to reexamine the address in my pocket. When I enter again, the receptionist, a middle-aged Russian woman, eyes me with an imperial look and asks in a strong accent, "Are you here to give me money?" It makes sense, I realize, this front. Even if a sleuth has followed me here, he'd miss my purpose. She takes my check and throws it unceremoniously into a drawer and goes back to work. What a menagerie of the unfaithful this woman must have met. Gay men by the dozens. A mom with two kids in the stroller who's gotten pumped by the guy next door, at home these days while he's looking for work. And probably lots of fellows like me, graying and in middle years, raddled by fears about the three-hundred-dollar hooker they passed some time with. Weakness and folly are her business.
The actual test is uneventful by comparison. I am in a medical office across from University Hospital, where I sign in only with my number. The woman who draws the blood never bothers with a smile. After all, every patient is a potential peril to her
. She gives me no warning that the needle may hurt.
Four days later, a counselor informs me I'm clean. I tell Anna the next time I'm with her. I debated saying anything but realize that hard science is better than my word about my personal history.
"I wasn't worried," she answers. She peers under her full brows. "Were you?"
I'm sitting on the bed. It is noontime, and down the hall I can hear the minibar porter knocking on doors so he can come in and check-a great pose for a PI, I think in my current state of disquiet.
"A lot of questions I didn't want to ask." Because I cannot promise not to sleep with Barbara, I have realized that I am in no position to ask fidelity from Anna. I still do not know whether she is seeing other men, but I seldom get responses to the brief e-mails I dare to send her on the weekends. Oddly, I am not jealous. I repeatedly imagine the moment when she will tell me she is moving on, that she's gotten what she can from this experience and is going to resume her progress toward a normal life.
"There isn't anyone but you right now, Rusty." 'Right now,' I think. "And I've always been safe. I'm sorry I freaked. But I'd never have an abortion."
"I shouldn't have done it."
"I loved it," she says quietly, and sits beside me. "We could do it that way. Now that we know. I have a diaphragm."
"And what happens when you meet somebody else?"
"I told you. I'm always safe. I mean," she says and stops.
"What?"
"There doesn't have to be anyone. If you tell me you're thinking about leaving Barbara."
I sigh. "Anna, we can't keep having this conversation. If we have only two hours together, we can't spend half of it fighting."
Now I've hurt her. It's always easy to read when Anna is angry. The hardest piece of her, the one engaged by the cruel mechanics of the law, takes over and her face becomes rigid.
Sorely tried, I sprawl on the bed and put a pillow on my face. She will recover in time and settle beside me. But for now, I am alone and in a kind of meditation where I test myself with the question she has often asked. Would I marry Anna if some freak circumstance somehow made it possible? She is howlingly funny, a pleasure to look at, and a person I savor, dear to me as breath. But I have already been thirty-four. I doubt I could rejoin her on the other side of a bridge I've already crossed.
Yet something else is as suddenly clear as the solution to a math problem I formerly could not solve. I see now what I have come together with Anna to recognize: I erred. I blundered. She may not be the right alternative. But that doesn't mean there never was one. Twenty years ago, I thought I was making the best of many bad choices, and I was wrong. Wrong. I could have done something else, found someone else. Worse. I should have. I should not have returned to Barbara. I should not have sold my happiness for Nat's. It was the wrong choice for all three of us. It left Nat growing up in a dungeon of voiceless suffering. And yoked Barbara to the daily evidence of what anybody, in a righter mind, would prefer to forget. My heart right now is like some overloaded man-ofwar toppled by a light wind, sinking into the waters it was meant to sail. And it will not do to blame anybody but myself.
When I return to chambers, there is an urgent message from George Mason on my desk. Three, in fact. Life in the court of appeals moves at the pace of suspended animation. Even so-called emergency motions can be resolved in a day or two, not an hour. When I look up, George is on the threshold. He has come down in person in the hope I have returned. He is in shirtsleeves, stroking his striped tie as a way to soothe himself.
"What?" I ask.
He closes the door behind him. "We issued the opinion in Harnason Monday."
"I saw that."
"I bumped into Grin Brieson on the way to lunch today. She called Mel Tooley to arrange for Harnason's surrender and never heard back. Finally, after the third call, Mel admitted he thinks the guy is in the wind. The coppers went out this morning. Harnason's been gone at least two weeks."
"He jumped bail?" I ask. "He fled?"
Harnason went to a riverboat casino and used a high-limit credit card to buy twenty-five thousand dollars in chips, which he promptly cashed to grubstake his flight. With a two-week head start, he is probably far outside the country.
"The papers don't have it yet," George tells me. "But they will soon. I wanted you to be prepared when the reporters call." The public doesn't know a thing about what supreme court justices do. But they will understand I let a convicted murderer loose who will now be at large forever, one more bogeyman to dread. Koll will bludgeon me with Harnason's name. I wonder vaguely if I have actually given the jerk a chance.
But that is not what paralyzes me when George finally leaves me alone behind my large desk. I have known for the seven weeks I have seen Anna that disaster was looming. But I hadn't seen its shape. I was willing to chance hurting the people closest to me. But no matter how ironic, I am stunned to realize that I have assisted in a serious violation of the law. Harnason played me so well. The election is the least of my concerns. With the wrong prosecutor-and Tommy Molto is certainly the wrong prosecutor-I could end up in jail.
I need a lawyer. I am too disoriented and full of self-reproaches to figure any of this out myself. There is only one choice: Sandy Stern, who represented me twenty-one years ago.
"Oh, Judge," says Vondra, Sandy's assistant. "He's been out of the office, a little under the weather, but I know he would want to talk to you. Let me see if he can take the call."
It is several minutes before he is on the line.
"Rusty." His voice is frayed and weak, alarmingly so. When I ask what's wrong, he says, "A bad laryngitis," and turns the conversation back to me. I do not bother with
pleasantries.
"Sandy, I need help. I'm ashamed to say I've done something stupid."
I await the ocean of rebukes. Stern is fully entitled: After I gave you another chance, another life.
"Ah, Rusty," he says. His breath seems labored. "That is what keeps me in business."
Stern's doctor has ordered him not to talk for two weeks and thus not to come into the office. I prefer to wait for him rather than seek advice from anyone I would trust even a fraction less. After forty-eight hours pass, I recover my balance somewhat. The news of Harnason's flight has broken. The police have run all leads and found no trace of his whereabouts. Koll has howled about my misjudgments, but the controversy is relegated to a two-inch item at the bottom of the local news page because the general election is so far away. Ironically, Koll would have scored far larger if he'd remained in the primary.
I have no idea how the mess with Harnason will play out, if Sandy will advise me to make a clean breast of the matter with the court or keep my peace. But my soul is at rest on one thing: I must stop seeing Anna. Having had a taste of ruin again, I cannot tolerate any more danger.
Three days later, I arrive early in the lobby of the Hotel Dulcimer, to be sure I intercept her before she goes up to the room. From my untimely appearance, she knows something is awry, but I draw her toward one of the columns and whisper, "We have to stop, Anna."
I watch her face crumple. "Let's go upstairs," she says impatiently. If I say no, I know she will be unable to keep herself from making a scene here.
She cries bitterly as soon as the door is closed and takes a seat on an armchair, still in the light raincoat she wore in today's storm.
"I've tried to imagine," she says. "I've tried to imagine this so many times. What was I going to feel like when you said this? And I just couldn't. I just couldn't, and I can't believe it now."
I have decided in advance not to explain about Harnason. I said nothing at the time of the incident, and no matter how paradoxical, I'm certain the same woman who encouraged my illicit passions would be crushed to think I could behave as a judge with such blatant impropriety. Instead, I say simply, "It's time. I know it's time. It's only going to get harder."
"Rusty," she says.
"I'm right, Anna. You know that."
To my surprise,
she nods. She herself has been coming to terms. Eight weeks, I think. That will be the final duration of my flight from sanity.
"You have to hold me again," she says.
She is in my arms for a long time as we stand just inside the door. It is a bookend of our first moments together. But we hardly need the reminder. The bodies have their own momentum. We are both quick to finish, knowing perhaps we are on stolen time.
Dressed again and at the door, she clings to me once.
"Do we have to stop seeing each other?"
"No," I say. "But let's give it a little while."
Once she's gone, I lie there a long, long time. More than an hour. The rest of my life, dark and doomed, has started.
I would say there is no coping with the loss, but that is untrue. I walk through my life like an amputee who feels the phantom pain of the missing limb, my heart bursting with longing and my mind telling me, in perhaps the saddest note of all, this too will pass. Never again, I think. The curse has now come true. Never again.
After a week, it's better. I miss her. I mourn her. But some peace has returned. She had been so unattainable-so young, so much a citizen of a different era-that it is hard to feel fully deprived. And no matter what the course with Harnason, this part of the tale will remain untold. Barbara will not know. Nat will not know. I have avoided the worst.
I wonder all the time. Is it Anna I miss? Or love?
Two weeks after our last meeting at the Dulcimer, Anna shows up in chambers. I recognize her voice from my desk, where I am working, and hear her tell my secretary that she was in the building to file a brief and just wanted to drop by. She lights up when she sees me in my doorway and breezes into the inner chambers uninvited, just another former clerk who's happened by to pay respects, something that occurs all the time.
She is gay, joking loudly with Joyce about the fact they are each wearing the same boots, until I close the door. Then she slumps and drops her face into her hands.
