The Age of Reinvention

by Karine Tuil

  The message is from his mother.

  * * *

  1. Marc Costanza, the security guard for building number 23 on Fifth Avenue, is forty-five years old, the son of an Italian immigrant. Born in Little Italy, in New York, he quit school very early to work in the family shoe repair store. Now he works as a night watchman and is taking acting classes. His ambition? “To be the next Al Pacino.”

  2. Elisa Hanks had not always wanted to be a lawyer. Until the age of seventeen, she had been destined for a career as a ballet dancer, but a car accident left her paralyzed for two years. So she gave up her dream and enrolled in a law degree program, on the advice of her father, the lawyer John Hanks, who was hoping she would take over his firm—which she did, without much enthusiasm, ten years later.

  5

  Article published in the New York Times Magazine, February 22, 2007:

  Above the desk, on the wall of his sober, elegant office, are two Robert Mapplethorpe photographs: in the first, a naked woman in black leather gloves is aiming a revolver; in the second, a man shot in profile, tattooed and muscular, is wielding a knife. A taste for provocation? In the straight-and-narrow world of the law, Sam Tahar cuts a mysterious and slightly sulfurous figure. This olive-skinned man, who looks like he’s just walked off a set of The Godfather, has a secretive nature bordering on paranoia. The first thing he says to me, with an enigmatic smile, is: “You won’t find out anything about me.”

  And yet, the story of his rise—from his birth in 1967 to parents who were literature professors—is undoubtedly intriguing. Arriving in the U.S. in the early 1990s, he has become, in less than fifteen years, one of the most high-profile lawyers on the East Coast. His critics would argue that his marriage in 2000 to Ruth Berg—daughter of Rahm Berg, one of the richest men in the country—is not unconnected to this fact . . . But after two hours of conversation during which he reveals himself to be, by turns, irresistibly seductive, brilliantly manipulative and thoroughly professional, it becomes clear that his rise cannot be reduced to that.

  “My life has been marked by tragedy,” he admits in a rather grave voice. “I’ve had to fight to get where I am today.” Then he adds: “You won’t make me say more than that.” His biography is revealed succinctly and somewhat reluctantly. In the course of the interview, he lets slip the fact that his parents died in a car accident when he was twenty. That he left for the U.S. shortly afterward to rebuild his life. That his real first name is Samuel. That his parents were North African Jews, secular and politicized, friends with the philosophers Benny Lévy and Emmanuel Levinas.

  But the man himself, though perfectly polite and affable, clams up as soon as his personal life is mentioned: “I am my work,” he says. Then: “I like people for what they do, not what they are.” There are no personal photographs on his impeccably tidy desk, no objects that might betray a private life he is determined to keep private: “I don’t like talking about myself, I don’t like having my picture taken.” And you will find no trace of Sam Tahar on any social network: “I don’t have time for that,” he says. “I prefer to read books. I love literature, politics. I love words generally.” Immediately he quotes a few lines from Martin Luther King’s famous “I have a dream” speech: “ ‘No, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.’ Damn, now I’ve said too much,” he jokes.

  But is Sam Tahar really as discreet as he makes out? He did agree to appear on CNN, after all. “That was strictly professional,” he objects. “I didn’t want to put myself forward, but my client refused to appear.” And who are his latest clients? The families of two young soldiers killed in Afghanistan, soldiers who have in a few days become symbols of heroism: “I don’t know if I would have the courage to do what they did,” says Sam Tahar. To hear his version, his life has been completely unremarkable. His childhood was “uneventful” (meaning: a normal, middle-class upbringing), and he spent several years in London (which explains his almost perfect English—although he does have a slight, and very cute, French accent, a fact that only adds to his je ne sais quoi): “There’s really not much to say about me,” he concludes, inscrutably. And yet, when you look into his dark eyes, flickering with intelligence and humor, that seems very hard to believe.

  Despite his deliberate elusiveness, Sam Tahar is nonetheless a brilliant communicator, a subtle diplomat who has built his career with a determination that is somewhat awe-inspiring. Having studied law in Montpellier, in the south of France, he joined the firm of Pierre Lévy, a famous French criminal defense lawyer. He stayed there for two years. Lévy says of his protégé that he is “intellectually peerless. A very gifted and great lawyer,” before adding with a laugh: “And he could seduce a chair leg!”

  Yes, Sam Tahar is famously charming—a little too charming, according to some of his critics, who prefer to remain anonymous: “It’s simple: whenever he talks to anyone important, Tahar immediately goes into full-on seduction mode.” Another detail: all his friends and protectors are thirty or forty years older than him. “He seems to have a thing about gray hair,” smirks one of his competitors. “Age is not important to me,” Sam Tahar explains solemnly. “I choose my friends based on our affinities, and it’s true that I have always had more in common with people older than me. They are more interesting, more amusing than people of my own generation, who are obsessed by one thing only: success.”

  Pierre Lévy, certain of his protégé’s potential, sent him to the United States, where he passed the bar exam in New York before being appointed head of the firm’s newly opened branch in Manhattan. This was where he met his future wife. Ruth Berg opened the doors of American high society to him, but he seems to be more attracted to the ghettos. For, while he may hang out with elderly aristocrats, it’s in the Bronx that he finds his clients. He made his name defending a young, illegally employed Mexican waitress who was raped by her employer; two members of the Jewish Orthodox community accused of dealing Ecstasy; a black store owner who robbed a jewelry store, leading to the deaths of two people . . . but his most famous cases are those made in conjunction with feminist groups, representing teenage gang-rape victims. “Being a lawyer does not mean proving your client’s innocence. It means taking apart your opponent’s arguments,” he explains. To his critics, who accuse him of opportunism and always going for high-profile cases, he replies with a quote from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War: “If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by.” When you mention his success, however, he quotes a line that he attributes to JFK (though I can find no evidence that Kennedy ever said it): “The art of success consists in surrounding yourself with the best.” I say he seems to love political speeches, and he admits: “If I hadn’t been a lawyer, I would have loved to be a speechwriter for a great statesman.” In his office library, there are autobiographies, interviews and documentaries retracing the key moments of French and American political life. I ask him which of these great men he would like to have met, and he instantly replies, “René Cassin,” the man who wrote the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948: “In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize, he said that people should recognize that they cannot work efficiently on their own, that they must feel supported by the understanding and determination of everyone else. That’s an important idea for me, as I’ve really built myself through encounters with other people.” So is he really such a shadowy figure? I doubt it. Watching him disappear quickly when our interview is finished, I think of the title of a book by Budd Schulberg: What Makes Sammy Run?

  6

  Nina translates the article for Samuel, without dwelling on the details. He isn’t fooled, however: “All right, I get it . . . You think I didn’t understand that he remade his own life by pillaging mine? He calls himself Samuel and claims he lost his parents at twenty in a car accident . . . that’s my story. I left the two of you together and went off to bury my parents in Israel, and you and he leapt strai
ght into bed! I should have dumped you when I had the chance. I should never have stayed with you after what you did to me. Hang on, I’m not finished . . . He says he loves literature, but how many books is he claiming to have read, that son of a bitch? I bet he never got past page fifteen of War and Peace! And the worst of it is, he’s making himself out to be a Jew—a Sephardic Jew like my father! You think I’m just going to let him get away with this? Fuck that! I’ll tear his bullshit story to pieces!” Nina tries to calm him down: “Does it really matter? It’s all in the past. He doesn’t live in France anymore. What difference does this make to our lives? What does it change? We’ve lived together for twenty years without giving him a moment’s thought . . .” “What does it change? It changes everything!” “He took two or three bits from your life story, but that’s all. He finished his law degree, and you didn’t. The career is all his too, so what’s your problem?” What’s his problem? Oh, he sees where she’s headed with this. He is the failure, no doubt about it. What exactly is at stake, right now, in the privacy of their conversation? What challenge? What test? What corruption? Why does he turn toward her and say, in a peremptory, almost cutting tone: “You’re going to get in touch with him and see him again”? “What? Are you crazy?” No—the answer is no. She has no intention of calling him, or seeing him again. It’s over. Water under the bridge. She’s turned the page. Now they need to move forward together, get on with their lives, but he interrupts: “Listen to me, now. We are going to get in touch with him, both of us [she shouts: “Never!”] and this time I’ll see if you really want to stay with me . . .” “What is wrong with you? You’re completely crazy!” Nina loses her temper: “Never, do you hear me? I will never see Samir again!” and it’s clear what she means: never again, after what happened between them. Neither of them has forgotten the past: it is between them, it is in them, and that threat of his, that blackmail—the only way he found to keep her because he knows (and what is he trying to prove by putting her to the test?) that she would have stayed with Samir if he hadn’t attempted suicide: she would have made her life with him, perhaps they would even have had a child—or two, or three—and this idea makes him sick at heart. Twenty years later, nothing has changed. “He’s pillaged my life and you don’t even care? He has built his life on the ashes of mine and I’m supposed to just lie back and take it?” “I don’t understand what you’re talking about—what exactly are you planning to do? Meet him? Threaten him?” Yes, he can see himself now, gun in hand, the chamber loaded, finger tensed on the trigger. “This is insane. What’s wrong with you, Samuel? Call him if you want and tell him what you think. Or go see a shrink. But don’t ask me to see him again.” “You’re scared of seeing him again, aren’t you? Admit it! Are you scared, Nina?” “No.” She wishes she could find the words to reassure this broken man, but she can’t.

  * * *

  There is something deeply tragic—something that speaks of human fragility—in living with a person whose extreme sensitivity informs every aspect of his relationship with the world, his social place; a vulnerable, unprotected soul, his resistance to brutality being tested in the laboratory of society. “I want us to see him again. Together.” And finally she surrenders: she agrees to do what he wants even though, deep down, she knows she will be the one caught in this trap. Twenty years on, she thinks again about Samir. She could have loved him—this is a plausible hypothesis, nothing more. But for a woman like her, so strict in her morals, it is a form of torture. The volcano may have been dormant for twenty years, but all it takes is a single shudder of the earth and lava will spurt from its mouth; get too close and the burning discharge will cover everything.

  * * *

  “What exactly are you trying to do? Test me? It’s pathetic, ridiculous . . . You want to know if I still have feelings for him? If I might fall back in love with him? Or are you just trying to get your revenge on him for what he did to you? Yes, maybe that’s all it is, after all—bitterness.” She’s right: he has become a bitter man. He thinks: Why him? Why him and not me? He compares himself to Samir, counting up the points that society has awarded them for success. And he loses.

  * * *

  One hour later, the discussion is over. She says, I’m sleeping on the couch. A temporary retreat before her definitive withdrawal. She is moving up the gears—toward a breakup, toward the future. Not him, though. He is sunk in the past, thinking about the evidence he keeps in a folder, hidden at the back of the storage room off the hallway. He waits until she falls asleep and, when the coast is clear, he goes into the hallway. Yes, the moment has come. He pushes open the storage room door with his knee. It gives way. He can enter now, but he remains in the doorway, then takes a step back, repelled by the lingering stench of mildew that impregnates his clothes. So he wraps a scarf around his mouth like a gag and enters the storage room carefully, presses the light switch—but it’s broken (as he should have expected), and he remains in murky dimness, tempered only by a ray of light that filters through the window above the door. The light illuminates an army of roaches climbing up the wall in procession, entering the cracks, resistant even to insecticide. He is filled with disgust, but he moves forward anyway, groping with his hands to right and left. He bangs his head into a wooden peg, then ducks down. His hand touches something fleshy, he scratches himself on sandpaper, keeps searching, and finally, under a ladder, sees the pocket folder with the word “PERSONAL” written on it. Rushing, he shoves aside the ladder so roughly that it almost hits him in the temple—but he catches it just in time and finally manages to grab the folder and get out of the storage room. His T-shirt is covered with dust and whitish threads; he rubs off this detritus with the back of his hand, like a lizard shedding its skin. In the living room, he approaches Nina: Are you asleep? She doesn’t reply. He gently shakes her: You’re not asleep—I know you’re not. She’s as tortured as he is, lying on her back like a patient on an operating table, body open to the surgeon’s sharpened scalpel. Samuel sits close to her, tries to kiss her, holds her and presses himself against her, but she refuses, holds him back, then opens her eyes, stares at him without tenderness, and pushes him away so violently that it shocks him. This is dangerous—she has woken the beast inside him—but she knows how to handle it. She has learned how over the years: never full-on, never during an attack; you have to know how to get past the beast, to the man behind it. So she tries to bring him closer to her . . . but it’s no good. He is beyond psychology, beyond reality, he is desperate, and all she can do is look into his eyes as he takes off his nightshirt, mounts his assault. Again Nina refuses and, as he begs her, she slips away, jumps off her improvised bed, and runs toward the bathroom. Locking the door behind her, she tries to forget that he exists. Ten minutes later, dressed in a gray sweat suit, she goes outside, calling to him: I need to get some fresh air.

  * * *

  The door bangs as if blown shut by a gale. The crack is so loud, Samuel wonders briefly if it’s broken, but he doesn’t get up to check: he is obsessed by the past, by Samir, and Nina is now nothing more than a shadow in the background. Anyway, who cares if it’s broken? he thinks, sitting on the threadbare couch and opening the folder. Inside is a pile of documents. He glances at the first few: his baccalaureate diploma (passed with flying colors); a philosophy essay with the title Is a Sudden Awareness of the Truth Always Liberating?; and three school reports from his final year. On the last of these, he reads the principal’s evaluation: “An intelligent, sensitive student,” and then, beneath this, his abrupt conclusion: “SUCCESS AWAITS.” Samuel wonders whether he should laugh or go out and find this principal—who may well be dead, of course, after all these years—and say to him: Look at me, look what I have become. He might even threaten the old fool—some prophet he turned out to be! He puts the report on the pile to the side and continues his search. He discovers several letters that he sent to his parents, the postmark indicating that he was in Meaux at the time, at a summer camp organized by a Jewish scout movement
for boys, the Eclaireurs Israélites de France. To his parents, he wrote: “I love you” and “I miss you”—he doesn’t remember ever having been capable of saying those words. There are also some old Métro tickets; a torn copy of Kafka’s Letter to His Father; a booklet containing the principal Jewish prayers in Hebrew; a broken cassette tape and a pair of damaged earphones; school photographs, family photographs. Samuel goes through the folder methodically. At the bottom, inside a black cardboard envelope, he finds them: five newspaper cuttings. A couple have been glued to a sheet of A4, the others are loose. All have the same headline: