by Reed Arvin
We would meet the next day, but not until the afternoon. I sleepwalked through my morning, seeing her naked skin in my mind, the pressure of my fingertips tracing the flushed skin of her body. There was a quick trial for Odom, something which, fortunately, required less than half of my mind to accommodate. I arrived to meet a client determined to fight to the bitter end; unfortunately, being videotaped buying crack from an undercover cop made his approach likely to land him in jail. It was a first offense, and I persuaded him that a guilty plea and a contrite attitude would get him back on the street sooner. It would have been better for my own peace of mind if a lowered, late-eighties Pontiac with rap music blasting out of it hadn’t been waiting to pick him up once he was given a suspended sentence and compulsory drug treatment. But I had long ago had to face the fact that I was a better lawyer than savior, and I couldn’t change my clients’ lives outside the courtroom. I would give them their due diligence, and if they were lucky enough to be free to go afterward, they went with God.
At three I headed to meet Michele at Virginia Highlands, an artsy patch of the city just north of downtown. The Highlands is an essential part of Atlanta’s optical illusion, a place that can actually make you believe all the disparate elements of the city are going to fit peaceably together in the end. That day its main street was alive with the rainbow, all God’s creatures nodding politely to each other and smiling well-fed smiles: tall Rasta men with their hair pushed up into knit caps; thirty-something women in determined, feminist clothes; young bearded Muslims all in white; lithe, impossibly thin women showing their midriffs and smoking cigarettes. Walking its streets, it was easy to believe that the McDaniel Glens of the world didn’t exist.
Michele looked like a rainbow herself, in a loose, flowing skirt of dark purple, orange, and black that made a lovely rustle when she moved. She wore a flimsy, off-white top, and three metal bracelets, all on her left arm. Her hair was pulled back tight and scrunched into a fanning ponytail of cornrows. She hid her eyes behind dark sunglasses, although I doubt there was much danger of opera stars being recognized on North Highland Avenue.
The district specializes in a kind of sanitized, funky edginess that lets people feel progressive without actually risking anything. It’s lined with New Age boutiques, vegetarian restaurants, and dimly lit clothing stores that burn incense and have bamboo wind chimes. Michele pulled me into several shops, asking my opinion about this or that; I was out of my depth, since my own taste in clothes is mostly to appreciate the woman wearing them. But she was in her element: here she tried on a pair of Asian earrings, there a belt of indeterminate hide, later, a shirt embroidered with brightly colored rag fragments. It was enough to watch her in her happy extravagances, losing herself in exotic fabrics or watching her show distaste for a pair of preposterous shoes.
I loved every second of it. There, where Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad all seemed to be getting along, we were not black or white. We were free to be man and woman, and that was all we wanted. I remember the hours and the minutes and the seconds of it, the fragile, blessed anonymity we felt. Underneath and intertwined with everything, unspoken but alive, was what we had done the night before. The way she closed her eyes when I pushed my hands down her back, the taste of her shoulder, the crashing moment of oblivion—all of it roamed the edges of our conversation, our fleeting glances, our momentary touches. Each moment had the dizzying rush of our sex on it, and the certain prelude that we would lose ourselves in each other again.
But for now, on that warm afternoon, there was no hurry. We walked the whole district, about fifteen blocks or so, taking our time. Eventually we slipped into the Darkhorse Tavern for an early dinner and a glass of wine. We were ahead of the dinner crowd, and the place was nearly empty. We sat deep in shadows, toward the back. We were giddy, eating off each other’s plates. The clock moved, ignored and irrelevant. Gradually, dusk grew outside.
There are times when anticipation is so sweet and exhilarating that it becomes a nearly unbearable pleasure. We moved more slowly as the minutes passed, savoring the unrepeatable moments of new love. We must have been there for some time, because the restaurant had slowly filled around us. We looked up and were surprised to be surrounded by other couples, which pleased us even more. The whole city seemed at peace, and we were comfortably in its center. Over drinks she said, “Your turn.”
“What?”
“To tell me your story. I don’t know anything about you really, and it’s not fair.” She smiled. “Except how you kiss, of course.”
“How do I kiss?”
“Spectacularly.”
“I would think that would about cover things, then.”
“I’m being serious. Where did you grow up, for example?”
“Dothan, Alabama. It’s pretty much like New York, only more sophisticated.”
“I’m being serious, Jack. I really want to know.”
“You know all that crap about charming little southern towns?”
“Yes.”
“It’s crap.”
She laughed. “It must have had something good about it.”
“Well, they probably wouldn’t beat the hell out of us anymore for kissing in public. Maybe.”
“That’s progress, I guess.”
I nodded. “And it had my grandfather, who was as good a man as ever scratched out what passes for a living in that part of the country.”
“What did he do?”
“Tried to turn a few acres of dirt into money,” I answered. “Took a shot at ten different things, from chickens to hogs to corn to alpacas.”
“Alpacas? The ones they make sweaters out of?”
“I think it’s just the hair they make sweaters out of.”
“You know what I mean.”
“He was no farmer, but I never heard him complain. Maybe he did when I wasn’t around. He would walk five miles to help a neighbor, and he would go hungry to make sure you got enough. He was a gunnery sergeant in the Pacific in World War Two. When I think about him, I can’t understand what’s happened to this damn country. I go into Odom’s courtroom, and it’s like a whole generation of men just forgot to grow up.”
She nodded, staring into her drink. “And your parents?”
“Good people. Alabama dirt farmers, like my grandfather. They’re gone now. But they saw me pass the bar.”
She smiled. “You’re like me.”
“What do you mean?”
“You got out.”
“I suppose I did.”
I paid the bill and we began slowly drifting back toward our cars. In the dusk, our touches became more intentional. Music was drifting out of a passing door; we stopped and listened awhile to a band playing the blues. Michele leaned against me, swaying in time to the music. “Let’s go in,” she said, pressing against me.
“Didn’t figure this as your kind of music.”
She leaned back and kissed my cheek. “Everything is my kind of music, sweetheart. Except for Johnny Cash, of course.”
“What do you have against the man in black? He loves you.” While we stood talking, the door opened, and a couple walked out. The music poured out into the street, gritty and soulful. We could see the band up on stage, and a small dance floor crammed with joyous, gyrating people.
We entered and blended into the crowd, moving through it happily. No matter where it travels, the blues remains the regional possession of the South for one unalterable reason: it is the only music that contains equal measures of joy and pain, which is the short history lesson of our part of the world. For that reason, it remains an essential element of the southern soul. So we were at home there, no matter what else might separate us. We found a table in the back, and I ordered some drinks. Michele was moving gently in her chair, and I watched her, lost in her graceful motion. She caught me watching, got up out of her seat, and demanded, “Let’s dance.”
“You gotta be kidding.”
She flashed a smile. “Let’s see you move your ass, white boy.”
I stood and walked her out onto the dance floor. She was free, and she was beautiful, a powerful combination of seductions. She came up next to me, and we started moving together, disappearing into the pulsating music. Our fingers locked together, and we moved together like mirror images.
The mind has the capacity to fix on a thing to the exclusion of other dangers, and we reveled in that state. We were part of a happy crowd of people, listening to the music that will always remind southerners of what we have in common. There are times when to be truly happy you have to deny certain realities, and with the help of the crowd and the music, we willingly did so that night. There was only that moment, and the beat of the song, and the moving crowd, and the sweet sensation of falling in love. I would have been happy for it to last forever.
We left her car in the Highlands and drove to my place. When we got there, we sat in my car outside my walkup. I warned her not to expect much. “It’s not exactly the Four Seasons,” I said, understating the facts considerably. And then I thought forget it, she’s here for me and not the furniture, and I kissed her on the mouth, as hard and passionate as I had in me. She closed her eyes and wrapped her arms around me, and for several long moments, my battered Buick was the most perfect place on earth. I got the door for her, and led her up the steps to my place.
I opened the door, and Michele walked into my nine hundred square feet of heaven, taking it in with a bemused expression: ratty, light gray carpet; a questionable mélange of furnishings, including a tan sofa and recliner, a small television, stark and watchful on a black stand; a five-piece dinette, bought well-used and not great to begin with; and above all, a decided lack of the comfortable details that make a space livable. Seeing it there with her, it looked sad, single, and male.
“It’s lovely,” she said.
“Oh yeah,” I said. “There are days I just can’t wait to get home and loll around in all this luxury.” I gave her a seat on the couch. “Can I get you anything?”
She shook her head. “No. I’m perfect.”
“Yes, you are. Just give me a second, will you?” I left her in the living room, slipping into my bedroom. When I came back, she was staring at a framed document I had received in an earlier life. “‘This is to certify that Jack L. Hammond was admitted to practice in the Georgia Supreme Court,’” I recited. “Signed by the justices.”
“It’s an honor, Jack. Why isn’t this down at your office?”
“I doubt it would make much of an impression on my current clientele.”
She stood and walked languorously toward me. “You really need to get over that,” she said, wrapping her arms around my waist. “Maybe I can help.”
She kissed me then, first softly, then more insistently. “Over what?” I asked.
She pulled back a little, fixing me in her gaze. “Over everything,” she whispered, and then we were lost in each other again, and nothing else mattered. The eager, unfettered passion of the airplane was tempered now, and I found my rhythm, happy to take my time in pleasing her, content to learn her crevasses, the precise lines of her hips, her stomach, her backside.
Late in the night I put on a Billy Joe Shaver disc, the one with the song about how love fades. She sat up in bed and listened for about fifteen seconds and said, “It’s so awful I can’t find words to tell you how awful it is.”
“I thought you said everything was your kind of music.”
She listened another few seconds, covered her ears, and said, “I was wrong.”
“Bullshit,” I said. “It’s exactly like La Boheme.”
“You will never touch my body again.”
“Listen, all he’s saying is that you take your joy and your pleasure when you can, because you know it isn’t going to last.”
“Ain’t gonna last, I believe he said.”
“Yeah. Ain’t gonna last. Just like Puccini and those damn bohemians. The difference is, the way he says it, I actually believe it.”
She was laughing now, flinging herself back down onto the pillows. “All right,” she said, “I will make love to that caterwauling if you promise to finish what you were doing a few minutes ago.”
“I love my work,” I said, moving toward her. I let my tongue trace her exquisite, dark legs from ankle to hip, stopping on a discreet, lettered tattoo high on the inside of her thigh. In the dark crush of the airplane, I hadn’t seen it before. The letters spelled Pikovaya Dama. Her breathing deepened, and she turned on her side, facing away from me. She reached back for my hand, pulling me up against her until she was wrapped in my arms. She turned her face to me and kissed me over her shoulder. Then she gave me a smile of such surpassing sadness, I could only kiss her again and pull her tighter. “It’s not a secret, you know,” she said. “You can see it when I wear a bathing suit. But only one in ten thousand knows what it means.” She turned her body and pressed herself naked against me, kissing me deep on the mouth. For the next few hours we forgot about the outside world, both willingly intoxicated by the presence of the other. There was the mutual rhapsody of touch and pleasure, leading to the moment of clenched eyelids and the trembling, white light of release.
Sleep followed, sleep like I hadn’t felt in years. I was never a man who couldn’t sleep with a woman in his bed. On the contrary; Michele’s gentle breathing took me down to a place of rest I had nearly forgotten existed. It was dreamless and dark, and past memories, for that time, ceased to exist.
When I opened my eyes the next morning, she was sitting in a chair, watching me silently. I smiled and sat up. “You’re dressed,” I said. “What time is it?”
“I’ve already called a cab,” she said. “I didn’t want to wake you.”
“Don’t be crazy. I’ll take you back to your car.”
She shook her head. “It’s better this way.”
I leaned back, letting the sheets fall down around my hips. “I could take the day off.”
She laughed, the airy musicality renewed in her voice. “I have things to do.”
And that was the moment when the first ray of reality crept through my blinders: she had another life, a life I couldn’t touch. I couldn’t ask, what things? I couldn’t ask because it would have ruined everything. It would be this way or nothing.
There was a car honk outside, and she stood. I got out of bed and stood naked before her, pulling her to me. I didn’t ask her when we would see each other again. There are times when questions about the future can wreck the present.
All that morning, taking a shower, getting ready for work, I was saying her name. “The great Michele Sonnier,” I said to the bathroom walls, the inside of my refrigerator, the closet where I kept my umbrella. I repeated it in the car, the wipers sweeping a sudden shower off my windshield. I substituted those words for the names of other women in the heartache songs WYAY played. I hummed it walking down the hall to my office. My mood was not to survive long after opening the door.
The first face I saw was that of a uniformed policeman, who was wearing a serious, Sergeant Friday expression. The second was his partner, a round, overweight man stuffed into his clothes. The third was Blu’s, who was visibly upset. Her voice cut through the fog of images.
“Jack,” she said. “Isn’t your cell phone on? I’ve been trying to call you for twenty minutes.”
I looked around numbly. “I don’t know. I ... I guess not. What’s going on here?”
The first cop answered. “A robbery,” he said in a flat, official voice. “Or at least a break-in. We haven’t been able to ascertain what, if anything, was stolen.”
“A robbery?” I looked around, momentarily confused. The door between Blu and my office was open; the air felt humid, even though the air conditioner was running. I walked across the waiting area and into my personal office. The window behind my desk was open, letting the morning inside. A few papers were scattered on my desk to let me know that someone had been there.
I walked back over to Blu. “You okay, baby?” I asked. “All your stuff still here?” Bl
u nodded, but I could tell the idea of somebody going through her things made her queasy.
“Counselor here’s got a colorful clientele,” the heavyset cop said. “Maybe it’s one of them.”
“Hang on,” I said quietly. A sense that something was wrong was pushing through my initial shock.
“What is it?” Blu asked.
I looked back at the door to my office, my unease growing. I walked back through the door, looking around. Everything seemed normal. I looked at a blank space on the little desk where Nightmare had been working. Doug’s computer was gone.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
DREAD IS INDEFINABLE. If you know what you’re afraid of—if you can define it—it loses power. It’s the unknown that climbs up your back and attaches itself there, humming ominously like a dangerous electrical current. A robbery and its sense of violation can crank that up to a rattling volume. Guilt plays into your emotional receptors, too; it heightens all your responses, making you hypersensitive. I had the fleeting sense that maybe the robbery was somehow connected to what Michele and I had been doing the night before. Was it coincidence that it had happened while we had been together? Or was it a karmic equalizer, God’s way of balancing pain and pleasure?
Guilt. That, for the criminal lawyer, is the operative word. It’s no accident that juries don’t find defendants innocent. They say they’re “not guilty,” because somewhere in the collective unconscious roams the knowledge that nobody is truly innocent or unstained. Those words just don’t fit the human race. So when you’ve been experiencing a kind of delirium with someone else’s wife—even if you know you’re falling in love with her—you start looking for rocks to fall, just to even things out.
So I was feeling the humming, the dread. The first thing I did was give Blu the day off. She was rattled by the break-in, and since I was planning on leaving, I didn’t want her to be alone in the office. She looked at me gratefully, picked up her bag, and walked out the door in a near-trot. Next I called Nightmare, just to assess the damage of the loss of Doug’s terminal; he didn’t answer his phone, which wasn’t a surprise. For him, nine in the morning was a time to go to bed, not get up. I left him a message, wondering what cyber-crack of Atlanta he had spent his night visiting. Then I went back in my office, alone, and sat down to think. Someone wanted Doug’s computer. My first thought was the most obvious: whoever had hired Doug had stolen it, simply because he didn’t want that information public. And it didn’t take a genius to put Horizn on the list of potential customers. The theft would be a way to cover their tracks. I liked that theory; it was clean, it worked. But there was another, darker alternative: It was also possible that Doug had been killed before he could get the information to his employer, by someone determined to prevent that transaction from taking place. If that was true, there was a third party at work, someone determined and dangerous, willing to commit murder.
