The Legal Limit

by Martin Clark

  She dated on occasion, but a third-shift job and two ragtag boys kept her strung out and frazzled, and she’d seen enough of men for a while anyway, which isn’t to say several of her suitors weren’t decent and respectful, and one, a retired Army sergeant, actually discussed marriage. She didn’t frequent the honky-tonks or doll up and drive to the bars in Greensboro, spurned her married supervisor’s advances and promises of a raise and a newer car and, unlike some of her friends, never brought men by the house when the kids were there, “uncles” who would lavish extravagant attention on the children in hopes of bedding their mothers, promises of fishing trips and BB guns forgotten after sex and a free meal.

  She stayed wed to Curt for nearly six years after he departed, figuring a divorce was an expensive formality, a luxury that would gain her nothing, and when she finally visited a lawyer and made a down payment, it was Mason who asked her why she’d gotten tangled up with such a bum to begin with. “I suppose I mistook quiet for reliable and solid,” she said. “And nice looks for character. Then along comes Gates and I didn’t have any choice. You just kinda get your foot caught in a trap, and there’s nothin’ much you can do.”

  Gates grew into a community darling, a joker and a football star, his ferocity on the field and violent, freight-train hits almost pitiable at times given that most people recognized the story behind them, and it shouldn’t have surprised anyone when it became apparent a huge anger and a sturdy frame were the extent of his talents as a player and a person—by his final year of high school, he couldn’t take the slightest bit of coaching or criticism, he couldn’t bear not being king of the hill as a freshman at Virginia Tech, and he damn sure couldn’t tolerate correction from some sissy English professor, stubbing up and pouting and then skipping class altogether, gone from college by Christmas.

  Mason weathered their father differently. He was studious and self-contained, his own redoubt, a reader who appreciated the distraction of science fiction and the promise of Ragged Dick and The Count of Monte Cristo, a pupil who delighted his teachers, a kid who came from zilch and wore brogans and his brother’s ill-fitting winter coat and still was elected student body president, prom king and “most likely to succeed.” He occupied himself with every club, field trip, sports camp and school activity available, and he spent many a Saturday cheerfully volunteering at the pound, mopping urine and scooping dog crap, always making it a point to bring the strays and castoffs table scraps, a leftover chunk of biscuit or the burned end of a wiener, whatever he could scrounge, last suppers for most of the animals before Wanda the supervisor pierced them with a lethal needle and they yelped and lost their breathing and she burned them in the incinerator out back. Wanda told her sister you didn’t need a Ph.D. to understand why he spoiled the skittish ones—the curs with lumps and cuts and tucked tails—more than the rest.

  And while he didn’t have his brother’s size, swagger or aggressiveness, Mason was a gifted athlete also, a left-handed first baseman who earned a free ride at James Madison University and did well enough on the field to get drafted in the middle rounds by the St. Louis Cardinals. Ever practical, he thanked them for their offer of twenty-five thousand dollars and a minor-league contract, told them he probably didn’t possess the skills to make a living as a big leaguer and accepted a substantial scholarship from the University of Richmond’s law school. A torts professor gave him a part-time job, his grades were superior, his outlook sanguine, his prospects sound.

  No matter how busy he was with classes or work, he never failed to keep his mother in mind, doted on her, surprising her with simple gifts and then the entire first check from his summer job at a Richmond law firm, occasionally returning home to sit with her on the brick steps and eat watermelon slices or plink snap beans into a thick glass bowl, the two of them jawing about local concerns, everything from a neighbor’s cancer scare to the big Saturday-night Rook tournament. By his third year of law school, his break from Stuart was looking clean as a whistle, his way clear—clear until he discovered himself on Russell Creek Road, caught in Gates’s slipstream, jarred and rattled, shit coming at him he hadn’t bargained for.

  At Allison Rand’s core was a patent invitation to sex, and there was nothing she could do about it, even if she’d wanted to: her eyes were green, honeyed embraces, slightly languid but permanently in on a very private joke, her hair blond, her smiles given more to satisfaction than mirth, her shape, from calves to breasts, overtly appealing. She was an inch under six feet but never seemed large or clumsy or heavyset, moving in fluid, breezy steps, gliding into a room, reaching for a cocktail and encircling it with fingers that suggested caress rather than grip. She was blessed with a voice perfect for her build, neither flighty nor leaden, and a quickness in conversation that was natural and unrehearsed. She had a tender heart and kind disposition, and to her credit she never lorded her appearance over other people. Even so, an occasional acquaintance would keep her at a distance and flay her name with whispers and gossip, tut-tutting about her wardrobe or habits or sports car or trips to Bermuda or boyfriends or the “arrogant” way she reclined against the railing during the Foxfield steeplechase, sipping a mimosa and making nice to everybody’s date or husband. To the petty and envious, she was a bitch by beauty, and she’d come to accept the cold shoulders and lukewarm smiles for what they were, deciding the trade-off wasn’t so bad, not so bad at all.

  Allison met Mason late in the summer of 1985, after he’d graduated from law school. He’d taken the bar examination and been offered a job at McCloud, Flanagan in Richmond, recommended by one of his professors who did freelance consulting for the firm. They were at a bookstore in Shockoe Slip, Allison to hear a popular author read, Mason because he saw the crowd spilling onto the sidewalk and stopped to see what was happening. Allison caught a glimpse of him standing in the overflow near the shop’s doorway and made no bones about nudging the woman beside her and turning back for a second, obvious gander, happy to spy the rare man who made her first cut: taller than she, handsome, possibly literate.

  The author was reciting from her novel, and Mason hung around for twenty ponderous minutes listening to the story of a maddening husband and wife on a picnic, ants invading their sandwiches, their conversation about a sickly child. When the writer finished, Allison sidestepped to the end of a folding-chair row and turned to leave. Mason was lingering at the threshold of the store, watching her, waiting to find out if they were going to advance any further. He gave her a direct smile as she walked toward him.

  “Hello,” he said, cocksure. “I’m Mason. Nothing like a stiff shot of prose in the afternoon, huh?”

  “Hi,” she said, her eyes up and down, not long on his face. “Allison.”

  “I think we noticed each other during the reading.”

  “We did, yeah,” she answered.

  “Did you enjoy the show?”

  “Yes. I think she’s an excellent writer. How about you?”

  “To be honest, I saw the crowd and was curious. I don’t read much for pleasure. Wish I did.”

  “Ah, what a clever opening,” she said impishly. “I’ll rise to the bait.” She moved away briefly to let a pair of chattering ladies pass. “What is it you read—not for pleasure—that you want me to ask about?”

  Mason laughed. “I’ll try to refine my pitch in the future. I’m a lawyer, a very new one. I took the bar exam in June, and studying for it provided me with all the reading I needed, thank you. I’m starting at McCloud, Flanagan soon.”

  “Do you think you passed?” she asked, and it hit Mason that everything about her, from the five-word question to her shortish skirt to the way she subtly spread her hands at the end of her sentence, was tinged erotic, the effect like moisture weeping through dam fissures, a puissant promise not quite held in check.

  “I studied hard,” he said. “Stayed up late, didn’t shave, ate bad food, worried myself silly—did all the right things.”

  “What kind of lawyer are you?”

  �
��I don’t know yet, to tell the truth. Are we playing twenty questions?”

  “Let’s make it ten,” she suggested. “Your bar exam for today. We don’t really have time for twenty.”

  “I agree.” He put his hands in his pockets, leaned against a bookshelf. “Have at it.”

  “Okay. Hmmm…Favorite lizard?”

  “Gila monster.” He smiled.

  “Me, I’m a chameleon girl myself.” She produced a tube of lip balm from her purse and began applying it while she spoke. “Joy buzzers, cigarette loads, rubber snakes or invisible ink?”

  “Joy buzzers.”

  “Good choice, though they all have pizzazz.” She dropped the tube into her purse, letting it go near chest level so that it free-fell through the air before landing. “Ever read Gertrude Stein?”

  “Lord, no. I guess I don’t mind laboring for a payday, but I don’t aspire to be in a fistfight for three hundred pages, either.” He stood straight, quit resting on the shelf. “She was a lesbian, yes? Of the wool-socks, pomade persuasion?”

  “You should give her a whirl. She’s amazing.”

  “We could have a deal breaker there.”

  “Last one,” she said.

  “You’ve got plenty more left.”

  “I know.” She fluffed the side of her hair. “This is important: best painter ever?”

  “Huh.” He studied her and noticed she really did seem to be putting him to the test. “Well, I’d say either Vermeer or Salvador Dalí. Those were my favorites from the art class I took at JMU to fulfill my elective requirements, and names like Cézanne will land you in trouble when you’re not sure how to pronounce the a.” He hoisted his hands from his pockets, realized a store employee was watching him and definitely not wishing him well.

  “I’ve heard it both ways.” She hunted through the contents of her bag without removing anything. “Either’s fine with me,” she said, not looking at him.

  “Where’re you headed? I’ve got enough cash to buy us a drink or two, maybe a cheap dinner if you play your cards right.”

  “Let me see your driver’s license, please.” She’d finished with the purse.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Well, I like to get an idea of people at their worst, sort of reverse beer goggles. Plus, I can make sure you’re not some ogre who lied to me about his name.”

  Mason gave her his license, and she held it in her palm and finger-read the information with her free hand. “Yikes! You favor Mr. Bentley, the guy who lives above the Jeffersons.” Her eyes were lined and painted like a pharaoh’s daughter, her hair an eighties Glamour Shot canopy. She smiled, white teeth, nicely sized and spaced and aligned.

  “Really? I thought I looked more like Gary Cooper.”

  “Gary Cooper after a jailbreak or a bender at Studio 54, maybe.”

  Mason grinned at her.

  “You and I were born in the same month,” she noted. She finally met him eye to eye, a tiny flirt.

  “So how about the drink?”

  “I’m with my friend, and I shouldn’t leave her,” she said, checking her watch.

  “Bummer. So am I at least allowed a question or a driver’s license inspection?”

  “Okay, but the clock’s running.” Mason noticed she had very little accent, finished off the g’s and didn’t linger on her vowels.

  “Worst song ever?”

  She answered immediately. “I’ll give you three. This is the kind of important info people need to prepare and have at their fingertips. One: ‘Honey,’ by Bobby Goldsboro; two: ‘You Light Up My Life,’ by Debbie Boone; three: ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ Led Zeppelin. Honorable mentions go to anything by John Cage, ‘Convoy’—”

  “Whoa now,” Mason interrupted. “Hang on there. I’m filing a protest. It’s not fair to use obvious novelty tunes.”

  “And finally, Neil Diamond and Streisand dueting on ‘You Don’t Bring Me Flowers’—terrible, painful commercial dreck. Being a boy, you will, I’m sure, object to the ‘Stairway’ inclusion, but I stand by that choice. It’s so overwrought and dramatic, a screeching, loud, pompous, white-bread cliché.”

  “Pretty compelling list,” he conceded. “You won’t find me defending Robert Plant.” He touched her at the elbow, a small come-on, almost a brush, his hand cupped, palm up, not much to it. “You’re sure you’re going to kneecap me on the drinks? I’d be glad to treat your friend. Bring her along.” He glanced at the crowd inside. “By the way, I know who John Cage is. I took a music appreciation class, too.”

  “You’re nice to ask, but I can’t. My last name’s Rand. It’s in the book. A bunch of us are going to a big party tomorrow night on Monument Circle—you’ll see the cars if you want to come.”

  They met that way, and they never embellished it or rearranged the facts or romanticized the circumstances or colored their motives. Years later, with no qualms and her head held high, Allison would tell close friends Mason simply wanted to fuck her from the first second he glimpsed her—no more, no less—and that was a compliment of the highest rank, a comforting connection, because say what you will, relationships, she was convinced, ignite in the eye. The most unassailable marriage has its roots in the quick math, the sine qua non, the base yes or no, the “bedrock issue,” she was fond of saying, often pausing to enjoy the pun when she explained her thoughts. There’s much more that has to come, many more integral numbers and symbols in the equation, a slew of other calculations, but by golly who wants to spend a lifetime with a sexless buddy, playing Scrabble or bridge, fussing over seating arrangements at a dinner party and sneaking home early from work every now and again to a bottle of Chardonnay and a mail-order vibrator. “Lay the block, then worry with the wallpaper and crown molding, you know?” she always remarked when she was on the subject.

  They met up at the bash she’d mentioned, and it ran on until dawn. Mason drank sparingly—doing so, he frequently informed his hungover pals, gave him superpowers around midnight, when everyone else was stoned, sloppy and reckless—and Allison switched from white wine to White Russians to white powder, white being her party motif for the evening, she declared. A cab carried them to her town house, where they kissed and rolled and rubbed and tangled up on the floor, the couch, the huge mahogany dining room table and finally her bed. Her skirt got pushed to her waist, her blouse was mostly undone and her bra loose, and Mason shed his shirt in the hallway near her door, but that’s where she stopped it, skin on skin, skin on cloth, exquisitely incomplete, a cocked pistol. She made them a breakfast of fried eggs, toast and cold smoked salmon, and they napped till noon, her head on his chest, her knee against his thigh. He left with her phone number, walked to a bus stop and went home happy as a clam, his recovered shirt all the way open, Eddie Grant’s garish “Electric Avenue” looping in his skull, unshakable.

  Mason was footloose that summer, at the tail end of a catch-as-catch-can romance with a feisty law student named Brenda who’d already packed her bags for a job in Boston, so with a clear conscience he phoned Allison the following morning and, not finding her, tried again that evening and three times the next day. Unable to afford a ritzy florist, he bought a quality bouquet of flowers from a street vendor, took the bus to her neighborhood, attached a note and had the doorman send up the gift, tipped the guy a dollar and then—when he didn’t hear from her—fretted that his lilies and daisies and single sweeping gladiolus had been tossed into the trash or forgotten during a shift change, never making it to her. A week passed, and she didn’t call.

  He next saw her at the Border Café, a raucous bar in the Fan District, where he’d gone with two law school friends to knock around and make a meal of the free “Thirsty Thursday” promotional hors d’oeuvres, mostly overcooked chicken planks and greasy wings with tepid ranch dressing. When Allison arrived, he and his friend Frank Eggleston were chatting up two college girls from VCU, though Mason had left several times to stand in line and fill his small plastic plate and bring Frank and the women fifty-cent cups of draft
Natural Light. Allison blew in with a group of noisy people, and as soon as she spotted him, she waved and smiled and didn’t hesitate, cut through the crowd, beelining toward him. She kissed his cheek and introduced herself to Frank and the women, who resented the intrusion and coolly said, “Nice to meet you” without offering their names or any sense that she was welcome. “I loved the sweet gift,” she said. “Sorry to interrupt, but I wanted to say hello.” She focused on the woman beside Frank. “What a gorgeous top,” she remarked, sounding sincere.

  “Oh, thanks,” came the curt reply.

  “I’m glad we ran into each other,” Allison said to Mason. “Stop by the bar and visit if you have a chance.”

  “I will if Master Frank and the ladies allow me time off from my manservant duties, fetching fowl and keeping their chalices full of grog.”

  She briefly bunched her lips, amused. “I’ve never thought I’d care for a manservant. Now a stableboy, something sort of D. H. Lawrenceish, that might be the ticket.”

  Frank dipped his head and pushed his tongue into his cheek. He peered sheepishly at Allison, then caught his friend’s eye. The two women hammered her with a stare that said, “You may be prettier than we are, but you’re still a big classless bitch, D. H. Lawrence or not.”

  Mason didn’t seem to notice. “I think, technically speaking, Wilbur Post was a stable boy. You’re setting your sights on Brylcreem and cardigans, are you?”

  Frank performed a quick Mister Ed riff, mimicking the horse’s speech. He ended by observing that Mister Ed reminded him of Carol Channing for some reason.

  “Nothing wrong with a snazzy dresser, Mason,” she said. “Nice to meet you ladies,” she added. “You too, Frank.”

  Mason kept track of her for another fifteen minutes or so, then excused himself under the pretext of using the restroom and threaded his way through the crowd to where she was standing at the bar. She was talking to a man and another woman, and from what Mason had observed, the man was making it apparent he had designs on her, leaning in to listen, handing her glass to the bartender for a refill, offering an aside no one else could hear. He pivoted a shoulder toward Mason as soon as he arrived, blocking him from Allison. Mason didn’t like him in the least, and wouldn’t have even if they weren’t interested in the same romance. Allison introduced him—Clement Watkins, Jr.—and he shook Mason’s hand a little too vigorously, smiled too aggressively and spoke with too much volume, as if he were pissing a circle around her with words. He was snarky and impatient and didn’t bother to conceal it.