Eccentric Circles

by Larry Duberstein

  Pollard doubted that. He took to looking for Kenny whenever he found himself out of the office; not searching in a concerted way, not making inquiries as in the beginning, just keeping his eyes open as he moved around the city. Sooner or later he’d see him. He strolled a lot and he could never help expecting to spot Busby at this corner or that, hunched over a coffee behind a delicatessen window. After mornings in court he would often stroll the Bowery, or ride the 1-Train down to Battery Park, where most of Kenny’s contacts floated up. He liked to walk, to explore—The Excellent Dumpling in Chinatown, The Harwich Grille in SoHo, new treats—and to reflect at leisure on his cases. Pollard thought well on his feet.

  He had begun to think more seriously about the law. Kenny’s shenanigans had somehow provoked him, bumped him out of a rut, an inadvertent kindness. The law was largely procedural, it had that nuts and bolts aspect where one manipulated the variables to get a result, manipulated even the truth, chief among variables. A good practitioner would know how to win the same case from either side of the dock, to pillory the former Miss Liberty Bell or see her absolved in the matter of her lewd entertainments down at The Fuckorama. Now, however, Pollard raced past the machinery of a case, he pursued the fundamental principles as if each time preparing to compose a majority opinion for the highest court, that would itself be tantamount to law.

  Yet he did this to no purpose, felt no moral calling; it simply happened. He had not got religion. The inspiration was more like the inspiration a painter might feel, to approach the thing and grapple with it. To be engaged. He no longer remembered the well-rehearsed talk he’d prepared for Kenny, but thought perhaps he had taken a big pot of his own nonetheless.

  Other side effects were less beneficial. Ron Weller suggested one day that Paul could use a break, a week away from New York, even a “sabbatical” if he needed it. A week later, Ed Kronstein made the same kind offer. Plus, the surfacing of Busby (and his subsequent resubmersion) had left a small but unfortunate distance between Pollard and Marya. For the most part she was resigned, but she could not help hashing over the theme each passing week. Kenny might be dead, was her latest. Someone like that could so easily stumble off a wharf and drown, or get himself torched by hooligans. How wasteful, then, to be shielding him at their own expense.

  Pollard could not imagine that Kenny had drowned or burned. He did recall his own surprise that night at dinner, when he saw how much worse, how frail and aged Kenny looked in decent clothes. But he knew things were better now—that Ken had food, lodging, maybe even hope. Maybe he was in Miami, stretched in the sun with a volume of Nietzsche or the poems of Baudelaire.

  One day in March Pollard got his invitation to the class reunion picnic, back on the beach in Abingdon. It was official: twenty-five years. They hoped everyone would be there, hoped everyone would send in twenty bucks. So Ken Busby was a stalking horse for the past recaptured, the long unexamined book of it reopened. Recalling the names and faces of other friends he had not seen in decades, Pollard signed on, happily enclosed his share of the beer money.

  He could not imagine the heat of July, or the horde of middle-aged highschoolers, balding and gray. He could not focus on the present either, and was relieved when Al Jacobs—a fine man, a good client—finally left him in peace. He was drawn immediately to the window and gazing down at the ice rink he found himself gazing right down the tunnel of real time to the pond where those boyhood games were played. Found himself actually seeing the wall of round cemented stones that bordered the course, seeing the loosebarked sentinel elms at the gate with their dark heavy curving limbs, and the green slatted bench where they stacked their schoolbags and shoes.

  He could see Scott Wilson looming tall between the lumped jackets that defined the goal, and Kenny Busby, the shy and gangly jester of the bunch stumbling down right wing to try that familiar wobbly wrister of his. Pollard saw himself too, sailing in behind so the rebound came straight out to his stick as though magnetized—

  This happened, he marvelled, just as surely as the inauguration of John Kennedy happened the same week; this too was an actual historical occurrence. So very long ago (the ice-cloudy texture of the day, and soon the fogging-down dusk) and yet he could feel the distinct heft of the rubber puck as he snapped a shot past Scotty’s glove to tie the game before dark and dinner. He could see Kenny turn toward him with that goofy smile, rabbit’s teeth, as they went into the timeless half-mocking celebration, hockey sticks upraised.

  Now as he swivelled back from the darkening glass, Pollard was returning Kenny’s grin—or resuming, after a vast expanse of time, his own—and his arms were lifted above his head for he had resumed the ceremony, too, sticks in the air …

  “Hare Krishna?” said Sandra from the doorway, puzzled, good-natured, arms loaded with files. Pollard’s smile quickly thinned, then bloomed again, for her; his arms descended slowly, as though sinking in deep water.

  “No,” he said, “don’t worry, I’m not that far gone.”

  The Lizard’s Egg

  Like any lawyer worth his salt, I have a weakness for words. Were it otherwise, I might have called this account HOW I LOST MY WIFE—a terribly mundane title—but it is the story of how that happened (how I came to lose her) and very little else, though I suppose if I don’t tell you who I am and who my wife is (or was, that is) you won’t really care how I came to it, nor sympathize a bit.

  So I’m Cal and she’s Barbara. We fell in love at Clark, Espenscheid, & Richards in Boston, where we both were working (and both still are) as attorneys, about halfway down the pecking order at the time. On paper we’re the perfect yuppie couple, easy targets I know, but really we are very decent people, reasonably intelligent, mannerly, no threat to our seatmates on the subway.

  Barb is even good-looking—intense, bosomy Barbara will attract a glance at every crosslight—though if looks were everything I’d never even have spoken to Britt Pomeroy, the sort of girl you only see when you know her. If anything were everything I would not have done, but of course it isn’t like that, life is not a prospectus, I spoke and more than spoke with Britt …

  I daresay I fell a bit in love with her, for I am not terribly experienced, if you know what I mean, and these things may take on more importance than they ought. Let’s just say that Britt was clearly something to me that Barbara was not, never had been, never would be. Still, I doubt I would ever have “gone off” with Britt (or she with me) and so I might never have lost my wife at all had I reacted differently to Sugar Ray Davis at the critical moment.

  I’ll get to Ray shortly (my whole unwholesome saga makes but the briefest brief, and might also have been called IN RE SUGAR RAY) but let me first set the scene at Britt’s place of residence. She is single, in her early twenties, and shares a house with quite a mixed flock. It isn’t literally shared, like a Sixties’ commune, but there is a sort of dormitory looseness to it, an air of friendship and openness, such that they tend a common garden, cook out most summer evenings, come and go freely through one another’s doors.

  There are a couple of couples (one gay), a single mother with her son, and six others unattached, including Britt herself and the fellow with a cot and a hotplate in the cellar, called Carburetor Man. He always smiles (shiny white teeth through the greaseblackened face) but he never speaks, just emerges from below cradling the latest rebuilt carburetor like a heart ready for transplantation.

  Knowing them only in summer, in odd abbreviated outfits, with their guitars and marijuana, I found these people slightly out of step with the times, half a generation out actually, except for Britt (in law school, clerked for us June through August) and the Davises. They are the mother and son, Carla Davis and her boy Ray—a tall, handsome black woman in her thirties and the most independent nine-year-old in semi-captivity. Nine going on nineteen. Carla “allows” him, that’s the stated policy. If Ray wishes to do it, and can do it, then he may do it. So he cruises the city day and night on his bicycle, anywhere and everywhere—Chinatown, the
M.F.A., Harvard Square of course. Gets himself into Fenway Park for free somehow.

  Last August when Britt and I were meeting twice a week, we met there, at her house, and I became a marginal furnishing in the general collection. Sugar Ray would poke his head in any time the door was unlocked—any time we were not in flagrante—as he and Britt were great pals. He had a charming little crush on her, and vice-versa for that matter. We never went “out” as such, but we often walked à trois to the corner variety for ice cream sticks, Ray and I being solid creamsicle citizens, Britt inexplicably drawn to the lime popsicle. And one time we did take Ray for a swim at the city pool, this my moment of great daring. Not at the pool itself, where those who toil at Clark, Espenscheid do not deign to bathe, but on the dicey cross-town drive, where I tried to sit up straight and smile, though my eyes were darting side to side like those of the rabbit in Mr. McGregor’s lettuces.

  People were melting like popsicles that day, the whole city was just roasting. To step back inside the office from the afternoon “air” was like the literal shock of an old-fashioned birth, the boiling and freezing waters juxtaposed. It was the kind of day on which a pudgy jogger in his cruel rubber suit could get from 200 pounds to a trim 180 all at once, if he could only survive the four miles.

  No one at the city pool was suffering. There we found some five hundred children (a dozen at most Caucasian) whooping and splashing in the huge turquoise rectangle, happily indifferent to collision, which was inevitable and frequent. It was impossible, really, to swim a stroke without encountering someone’s cranium or clavicle, but Sugar Ray was instantly at home; this madhouse was one of his regular stops, pay a dime and swim all day.

  Ray took it all as it came: the heat, the pool, me. Certainly he took me for granted, there or not there, all the same to him. Britt was forever trying to foster the connection, Ray in need of “father figures” and I therefore the great white father. Not that I minded much. I sometimes got a little kick out of it—maybe I needed a son figure. And the boy was special, though as I say so cool I couldn’t swear he even liked me. I know for fact he never once used my name, Cal, always getting by without a name or else employing “the dude” by way of third person reference. As in, “Hey Britt, the dude coming too?”

  And Britt would smile, first at him, then at me, and say, “Yeah, Ray, the dude’ll be coming with us.”

  It started getting gummed up between us when summer ended and Britt was no longer around the office. We kept on, quite truly fond of one another, but we did so with increasing difficulty and decreasing frequency. Britt was back among her fellow students and I was back into the rhythm of rising within the firm. The simplest plans, so easily fashioned in July or August, became tortuously complex negotiations, awkward telephone chases. We fell off by degrees, to twice a month, to once, to nothing at all. We fell off full of protestations, and good intentions, and even vague hopes for a future resumption, but we fell off nonetheless, steadily.

  I am sure I missed it more than she. She could so easily replace me, perhaps she already had. As the central figure in her romantic life I had always felt arbitrary, temporary, vulnerable. I am not a handsome man, nor even very forceful when you consider my chosen profession. Intelligent, as I have said, and decent, but at my very best I’d have to say underwhelming. Britt, though, was irreplaceable. For me there existed no options, no facsimiles, no shiny new versions. Without Britt Pomeroy I was definitely thrown back upon Barb’s charms for any companionship or stimulation I might seek.

  Which was best, in a way, for I had made the decision to stick with my marriage and there would be less success in the venture if the gulf between us further widened. The natural gulf left me adequate room to dissemble, during my time with Britt and after, whilst scrambling back. There was a difficult season in our home, to be sure, but at least the difficulty lay all with me. To Barbara life was proceeding apace; to me there were patches of unexpressed pain, swatches of a sinking vacuity and despair, as I slumped through a succession of desultory conversations and symphonic coffees at home.

  We muddled through, in the usual ways. I buried my head in work, we buried our heads together in good films and bad films, in sushi dinners and steak dinners and blackened swordfish dinners downtown. We tried a case together and won it, and I had a good win by myself, before a jury and brought off with surprising style. Barbara and I were both liked and linked at the firm, so that we ascended the pecking order hand in hand, myself just a chauvinistic peg above and Babs directly underneath, in a wry reference to our very occasional conjugal loci.

  By the spring we had risen to the second echelon of the letterhead at Clark, Espenscheid, & Richards—the Dirty Dozen, as it is playfully known. Barring all blood relations of the partners plus two instances of latent blackmail against them that were good as blood, only six names separated us from the bold twelve-point type enjoyed by the partners themselves. I had begun to think: Heads up, Roland Farnsworth, one more good win and I’m past you; step lively, Carol Goldstein; stand and deliver, A. David Pemberton! I was very lonely during this time, yet some days I could feel like a terribly important player in the wide world. Other days I knew I possessed the wisdom and maturity of a fourth-grader, or a fool—but a fool on the rise, dammit, and that really can help.

  Then came the day of reckoning. Ironically it was our best day in memory, partly because it was our first free Saturday since Christmas. After waking to a surprising and almost easy affection, we took a pleasant breakfast on Newbury Street and walked out into an absolutely sparkling May morning. The city had surpassed itself, had overnight drawn on this cloak of rich greenery and sun-brightened flowers for which there had been no visual precursor during all the long bleak months of lingering winter.

  We strolled to the Haymarket, poking around the stalls there, then rambled over to the water for a light lunch marred by one brief, illusory mischance. Across the dining room I saw some light brown tresses arrayed against a pale blue dress and with a small spasm recognized Britt Pomeroy. The shock drummed heavily upon my previously blithe heart, causing me to rattle my shrimp cocktail goblet in its pewter harness. Then the woman turned and was not Britt—was a pinched and rather nasty-looking girl in fact—but the damage had been done. How Barbara managed to suffer this subtle affront so completely I am at a loss even to speculate, but surely she had: our buoyant good feeling was instantly dispersed and nothing felt the same, then or ever again.

  Had that false flash passed over, or that isolated imaginary detail been excluded from my fate, the whole game might have played out differently. I might have reacted differently when apprehended a few moments later by Sugar Ray Davis, or missed him altogether, but what the hell. I am not sorry and in any event it’s history now—the history of how I lost my wife. The lizard’s egg will hatch, after all, and out will come the lizard!

  I hadn’t thought of Ray Davis in some time. When it first became clear the affair with Britt was ending I did feel a pang of regret at the attendant loss of the boy. By now, however, I had only intermittent flashes of Britt herself and even these had faded. They still held the power to strike, as we have seen, but perhaps no more to blind.

  I spotted Ray’s bicycle as we were drifting past the Aquarium. I recognized the bike first, with its rusty orange frame and shining set of gears that had come compliments of Carburetor Man, Britt’s cellar dweller. Ray was straddling the frame, watching an old man inflate balloons with a helium pump. A few of the inflated balloons, sailing on strings above the old man’s cart, had noses and ears. So the bike, the boy, and then the horror: Ray swung around and started rolling down the narrow esplanade toward us. Steered past a lazy seagull, squeezed the brakes, and pointed me out. “Hey dude, I know you!”

  Issue a firm denial? Look perplexed and issue a gentle denial? Stand silent on the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution? But really, imagine a man so weak, whether in his character or in his posture towards the world, that a child’s greeting can utterly discompose him. I managed a s
ickly smile, an attempt that no doubt looked more like a picture of a man biting into rotten flesh.

  “How you been, dude?” said Sugar Ray, also smiling, and playing the man-about-town. He did not smile a lot. I do not recall his ever having smiled at me before.

  “Good, Ray, and you?” I said.

  And that was that. Any chance to impeach his witness, to cast him out of this open air courtroom, had passed. Ray shrugged and kept boring in:

  “Don’t ever be to the house no more.”

  “No. Sorry. I haven’t.”

  “I think Britt misses you, maybe.”

  He had not once looked at Barbara, not straight at her, and God knows neither had I. Now we each did and were able to watch her face going off in sequence, like a firework on a string-fuse, fffffffft sizzlesizzle BOOM! And after the explosion there came no flood of tears, no spoken recriminations, no revealed feeling of any sort. There was only ice, the exquisite oval ice of her face.

  And Ray? He had flushed me, certainly he knew as much. There had been no accidental drift to his conversation. On the contrary, it had all been very theatrical and out of character. He was just nailing me, nailing the dude you know, though it occurred to me that he had never known about Barb. He had it all backwards, probably, thought I was two-timing Britt—and so he moved to shoot me down. Perhaps he felt betrayed himself, but in any case the damage was done and I am pleased to say I did my share of it.

  That’s right. I had not lied to the child, hadn’t tried to make him out the fool. Not that it would have worked, but still I’m glad I spoke the simple truth. Indeed I felt so elated having finally done so that I quickly compounded the damage by opening up to him altogether. I touched his head, looked him in the eye, told him to send Britt my love. I said it had been nice seeing him and I hoped we would bump again soon. I had poise, I was almost transcendent in defeat.