The Transformation of Things

by Jillian Cantor

  But now, sitting there with my list of names and ten calls to make, I was worried that she’d been right all along. And I still couldn’t get Amber’s words out of my head—Who’s going to want to be friends with her now?

  As I went one by one down the list, each call started the same way. “Hi, it’s Jen Levenworth.”

  Long awkward pause. Slow recovery. “Oh, Jen. I, uh …”

  A sigh from me. “He’s totally innocent. It’s all a big mistake.”

  “Of course it is. I never thought anything else.” Pause. “Oh, you poor, poor thing.”

  When I was done making the calls, I felt strange. Usually planning for the auction made me feel alive, but now my body was tight and heavy, and my eyes were having trouble focusing on the sheets of numbers. Stress. I pulled out the bag of herbs Ethel had given me and fished around for the new calming one. I swallowed the pill quickly with only a few sips of water, and then I sat and waited to feel something else, to feel calmer.

  After a few minutes I felt tired, so tired, in fact, that I lay down on the couch and closed my eyes. I thought about Will, and the facts I’d read about in the paper. And then I was dreaming.

  “Judge Levenworth, Jude Marris is here to see you.” I was sitting behind Will’s desk, cloaked in his blackjudge’s robe. I reached up and rubbed my hand through my hair, short and curly. I was Will.

  I looked up and met Janice’s eyes. “Thank you.” I nodded. “Send him in. “

  I was tired. No, exhausted. Case law to read. Verdicts to write out and decide. Lawyers to meet in my chambers. I pulled up my suit arm and glanced at my watch. Three-thirty. And I had at least four more hours of work. Better ask Janice to make some more coffee. And yet my stomach churned just thinking of it, the acid reflux I’d encountered since taking this job enough to put me through two bottles of Tums a week.

  The door opened up, and Jude walked in. He was a thin, wiry man who was rumored to have a coke habit, and I’d gone against him once back when I’d been trying product liability cases as a lawyer. I’d won. No, I’d annihilated him. “Judge.” He nodded.

  I nodded back. “Mr. Marris. “

  “May I have a seat? “

  “Go right ahead. “

  He folded his arms, then unfolded them again, shifting in his chair. I checked my watch, only three thirty-five. I sighed. “You know that matter we discussed last week,” he said.

  “I do.” I nodded again. His client was a big-shot CEO who was being sued for sexual harassment. Mr. Marris had already been in last week, asking for a motion to dismiss, which I’d denied. “Well, I talked to the client, and he’s willing to do anything.” He leaned in closer. “I mean anything, to win.”

  “You’ll be preparing a good defense then.” I shuffledthe papers on the desk, cuing him to get out, before it got awkward and I had to throw him out.

  “I don’t think you understand,” Marris said, leaning in closer. “Listen to what I’m telling you.”

  “Jen.” Will shook my shoulder, and I opened my eyes and saw him there, in our living room, looming above me. His face looked dim, blurry, and I blinked to try to get my eyes back in focus. “It’s after six,” he said.

  I sat up. “I guess I was tired.” But the words felt strange coming out, my voice thick, and all I could think about was what it felt like to be Will in my dream, how I’d felt so tired and overwhelmed and not at all happy sitting in the judge’s chambers.

  “Are you okay?” Will asked.

  I closed my eyes for a second, trying to erase the dull ache in my head, and then I nodded. “How was your meeting with Danny?” I asked, remembering where he’d come from.

  He shrugged. “It was fine.” His voice sounded low and stretched, so it was clear that it was anything but fine.

  He stood up, and I knew he was going to walk back into the study, and I didn’t want him to. I couldn’t shake the feeling of my dream, the feeling of emptiness. I reached out for his hand. “Are you hungry? Do you want me to make some dinner?”

  He shook me off. “No thanks,” he said. “I already ate.” And then he turned and walked into his study.

  Four

  The next morning I was still thinking about my dream, about how it had felt to be Will. I couldn’t get it out of my head, really, the exhaustion, the annoyance, the sense of being displaced, and it was strange because usually I didn’t dream. Sometimes, every once in a while, I’d remember a snippet of something when I woke up, but even then I couldn’t quite remember if I’d dreamed it or just seen it somewhere else. But not like this, not something that felt so vivid, so tangible, that it still lingered in my mind as a weird sort of half-truth.

  Will wandered into the bathroom as I was washing my face, and without saying anything, stepped toward me and put his hand on my shoulder, gingerly, as if he wasn’t sure how to touch me, as if I were made of glass, and if he did it too hard I could break, shatter all over the beautiful beige marble floor. His hand felt strange on my shoulder, almost as if it was pushing me away, rather than pulling me closer.

  But after a minute of hesitation, he moved his hand to the back of my neck and did pull me toward him. He started kissing me, softly at first, and then harder, and I got this odd feeling from him that I’d never felt before, not from Will, tall, steady, confident Will. No, this was something else entirely: neediness. It had been a while since he’d kissed me like this, kissed me more than just a quick peck, and yet as soon as he did, it felt natural again, and I leaned into him and kissed him back.

  He put his hand up to unbutton my nightgown, and his fingers felt warm as they grazed my bare skin. “I’m not ovulating,” I whispered, as if this would be the only time, the only reason for sex. After I said it, I realized how stupid it sounded, and I wondered if my head and my heart wanted separate things.

  “So,” he whispered back. “So what?” And then there was something else in his voice, some of that urgency I recognized from years ago.

  When we first got married, I would wait up for him to get home from the office, and even if it was ten o’clock and Will hadn’t eaten dinner yet, he’d start kissing me, and wherever he found me in the apartment, the kitchen, the living room, the bathtub, we’d be having sex right there, as if there was no time to move to the bed.

  But now Will scheduled everything. Every minute of every day, including, lately, sex—if you could count some of the quick, passionless exchanges as sex at all. I saw it there when I went in to vacuum the study, written on his calendar mid-month, just around the date when I told him I thought I’d be ovulating.

  The lawyer’s words from my dream swam in my head: He’s willing to do anything, anything to win. And the words from yesterday’s paper: twenty-five years in prison. I closed my eyes and had this horrible vision of Will in a tacky orange prison jumpsuit, his hand reaching for me across a partition.

  I heard my cell phone ringing from the bedroom, and I pulled back. “I have to get that,” I said, feeling both disappointed and relieved for the interruption. He nodded, but he turned away so he didn’t have to meet my gaze, and as I ran to grab the phone, I heard his footsteps treading heavily down the stairs.

  On the other end of the phone was my sister, Kelly. “Oh good,” she said when I picked up. “You’re alive.”

  “Yes.” I sighed. “I’m alive.”

  “You sound out of breath.”

  “I’m not,” I lied, closing my eyes and trying to breathe slowly, trying to forget the way Will’s lips had felt, needy and yet warm.

  I heard some screaming in the background and Muffet, the dog, barking. “Hang on a sec,” she said. “I’m putting Hannah down for her nap.” It made no sense, since she’d called me, but that was Kelly, always making me feel like I was the one interrupting her perfect life.

  Kelly lived twenty minutes south of us, in Oak Glen Borough, right on the edge of Deerfield County. She lived only one neighborhood away from the one we’d grown up in, from the house where our father had lived until he’d r
etired, met Sharon Wasserstein on JDate, and moved down to Boca Raton with her.

  But despite our physical proximity to each other, Kelly and I usually only saw each other on scheduled holidays and birthdays, and we didn’t talk more than once a week or so. The truth was, I would rather talk to one of my friends than talk to her, and she was always busy anyway.

  Kelly had three kids younger than the age of five, two boys and a girl. Her oldest, Caleb, had finally started preschool this year, but she told me, the last time I’d talked to her, that the chaos hadn’t let up. Once she’d described motherhood to me as drowning in a kaleidoscope. There’s colors everywhere, she said. So many colors that you can taste them, and nowhere to go and no way out. She’d paused and then added with complete sincerity, But I love it. Every minute of it.

  In addition to staying home full-time with the kids, she was also a freelance photographer, so dotting the walls, amid the clutter in her house, there were beautiful black-and-white landscape prints. They amazed me every time I saw them, the way my sister was able to capture something, a moment, in a picture, in a way that I never would’ve been able to see it at all. But that said everything, the way the world always looked so completely different to the two of us.

  “Anyway,” she said now, when she came back. I noticed it was stunningly quiet, and I wondered where she had to go to get it that quiet. The bathroom? “I was worried sick about you. Why didn’t you call me?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, mumbling something about being busy and planning on doing it right after breakfast. “And besides,” I said, repeating my spiel from yesterday when I made the auction calls, “he’s innocent. The whole thing is a mistake.”

  Unlike those other women, she wasn’t so easily convinced. “Are you sure?”

  “Of course.” I jumped to answer her, but I felt my pulse starting to race, sweat starting to bead up on my brow. “It’s Will,” I said. “Will.” I looked up, and suddenly my bedroom felt too bright, the blues in the room too harsh, and I wondered if this was often how Kelly felt with the kids. Stress, I reasoned. And I blinked my eyes, until the room looked normal again.

  “Will,” Kelly repeated thoughtfully, as if she really was trying to picture it, him doing something wrong. Yes, I thought, Will, the guy who refuses to drive even one mile above the speed limit. If it was forty-five, he set his cruise control exactly at forty-five. “Still,” she said, “you never really know how well you know someone, you know?”

  “Kel, he’s my husband.” I left out the part about us not really speaking beyond simple pleasantries in months, the part about my dream, so oddly specific that it almost felt real. How well did I know him now? But I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of knowing this. Not when she and Dave had the perfect life, the perfect marriage. Kelly even had a doting mother-in-law whom she confided in—something I did not have since Will’s mother was also dead.

  “So what now?” she asked. “I mean, what’s going to happen to him?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Our friend Danny’s working on it.”

  “It said in the paper he could go to jail.” She said it quietly.

  Tears burned hot in my eyes, and I blinked them back. “He’s not going to go to jail,” I said, just as quietly, trying to sound more sure than I felt.

  I considered, for a second, telling her about our moment in the bathroom, and how a part of me wished I was still back there kissing him, feeling his hands on my body. But then she would probably tell me about her own glorious and spontaneous sex this morning with her perfect husband, Dave, and I wasn’t in the mood, so all I said was “How are the kids?”

  “Oh, they’re fine. Everyone’s good.” She paused. “Jen, I really am worried about you.”

  “Don’t be,” I said, trying to sound absolutely sure. “Everything’s going to be fine. I gotta go,” I lied. “I’ll call you later, okay?”

  “Jen, I—” I waited for her to say something meaningful, something that would help, but all she said was “Don’t forget to call me.”

  After I hung up, I cradled the phone in my hand for a minute and wished that I really had been able to talk to Kelly, that I’d been able to tell her about my moment at the club yesterday and the strange state of my sex life lately. But Kelly was the most judgmental person I knew—especially when it came to relationships.

  Kelly and Dave had met in high school, and had been together ever since. They were one of those couples who, just to look at them, you absolutely knew they belonged together. They even resembled each other in this strange way—both on the shorter side, with brown wavy hair, green eyes, and a complexion just a shade lighter than olive.

  They started dating right before our mother died. Kelly was sixteen, and she’d brought Dave home to meet our mother, just before she got really sick. It was the last time she cooked a big dinner, and I can still remember what it was, her sumptuous barbecue brisket and kugel—two recipes that seemed to have disappeared when my father sold the house, though secretly I imagined that my father’s girlfriend, Sharon, stole them and was keeping them for herself.

  My mother kept smiling at Dave and heaping more brisket on his plate. And he ate it all, complimenting her on how great it was. I was thirteen, and I didn’t understand exactly how sick she was or how much Kelly liked him, and I left the table early, lying about having a lot of homework, but really I’d lain on my bed and listened to music.

  After she died, Dave was at the funeral and the shivah afterward. He sat there on the blue-plaid couch that my mother had purchased and my father would eventually donate to Goodwill,and he had his arm around Kelly the whole time, as if he alone was sustaining her, was literally holding on to her so she would make it through the week. I stared at them with envy and annoyance. I wanted someone to hold me up, someone to still love me. With my mother gone, it seemed like it was never going to happen again.

  When Kelly and Dave stayed together all through college and then got married right after, I told myself that it couldn’t possibly last. That there was no way you could love the guy you started dating at sixteen.

  When I was sixteen, I had sex for the first time with Joey Feldman, a guy that I dated for three months, who took me to the junior prom and then promptly broke up with me when school let out for summer. He had sandy blond hair and blue eyes, and he’d played soccer. There was nothing memorable about the sex except it sucked, the way every first time probably did, even with Kelly and Dave, though I doubted they’d ever admit that, even to each other.

  For a long time I told myself that the only reason Kelly stayed with him, the only reason she married him, was because Dave had gotten my mother’s approval, and that was something, maybe the last part of my mother, that she couldn’t let go of.

  Yet here they still were, thirteen years of marriage later, and you could tell by the way they looked at each other, the way they touched each other in seemingly insignificant moments, that they really did love each other.

  And sometimes, that was reason enough for me to hate my sister.

  I took my time, taking a shower, getting dressed, hoping that Will might have gone out. But he hadn’t. He was there, sitting at the kitchen table again, head in his hands, just like he’d been two days earlier. He looked up when he heard me walk into the room. “It’s over,” he said. “It’s all over.” He had tears in his eyes, which I saw him trying to blink away, as if he hoped I wouldn’t notice. I pretended not to.

  “Oh, thank God. They’re dropping the charges.” I sat down next to him, the sudden absence of his burden making me feel light, ethereal, almost dizzy, again. I leaned in to hug him, but he shook me off.

  “No,” he said. “Danny struck a deal with the prosecutor.”

  “What kind of deal?”

  “I’ll resign,” he said, refusing to look me in the eye. “And be permanently disbarred.”

  “I don’t understand. You’re innocent,” I said. Resign. Disbarred. These didn’t feel like words that were even in Will’s vocabul
ary.

  He shook his head. “I’m a judge,” he said. “Was. I was a judge,” he corrected himself. “I know better than anyone that innocent doesn’t always mean something.”

  I was shocked to hear Will so cynical, Will, who usually talked about the law as if it was glamorous dinner party fodder. “It does to you,” I pushed.

  He shook his head. “It’s complicated, Jen.” He sighed. “Danny says this is the only option, and I trust him.” He paused, then said quietly, “I can’t risk it. Waiting it out. Going to prison.” His voice cracked on the word prison.

  “No,” I said. “Of course you can’t.” But I wanted him to fight, wanted him to wait it out. Innocent people didn’t just roll over and play dead. Innocent people fought.

  “I know it’s hard for you to understand,” he said, as if for the first time in a long time, he actually did know what I was thinking. He looked at me, then looked down at the floor, the bamboo shiny and unflawed. “If you want to leave me I … I …” He held his hands up in the air, not sure how to continue the sentiment.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I huffed. “Do you want me to leave you?” A part of me hoped he would take the bait, the bait he never took, that we could fight, get angry, yell, have makeup sex that felt real and passionate.

  “No,” he said quietly. “Of course not.”

  “Well, why did you say it?” I egged him on.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I just … I don’t know.” He paused. “If you need me I’ll be in the study.”

  “The study?” I heard my voice rise.

  “Danny faxed me the papers,” he said, and then turned and walked toward the study, as if he hadn’t even noticed, as if my annoyance hadn’t hit him at all.

  Five

  The Deerfield Daily did a stellar job of reporting it all, every last-minute detail, in a front-page article replete with enough definitions and fact boxes to make your head spin. Resignation—notification of leaving a job. Disbarment—taking away officially the right of an attorney to practice law.