Bird's-Eye View

by J. F. Freedman

  “I don’t know. I was planning the trip home. I guess I’ll still do that.” A bright idea came to me. “You can come with me. We’ll be together, away from the pressure, we can work things out together.”

  “Work things out? What things?”

  “Our future. What else?”

  She looked away, out the window. We were in an industrial area; eighteen-wheelers rumbled down the road, making an awful racket. “What future?”

  I wasn’t getting it. “You and me. What other future is there?”

  She turned back to me then, and before she spoke again, I knew what she was going to say.

  “We don’t have a future.” The words were flat, devoid of emotion. Dead words from a numb brain. She put a hand on mine, the hand that wasn’t wearing the ring. It was dry, almost scaly to the touch. “How would we live? You don’t have a job.”

  “I’ll get a job.”

  “Where? How?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, starting to panic. This was spinning out of control, beyond the out-of-control that already enveloped us. “I haven’t had time to think any of this through. Jesus, Marnie, this is a fucked situation. For both of us.” I gripped her hand. “We’ll figure it out, that’s all. We have to, we don’t have a choice.”

  She was shaking her head no.

  “Look,” I plunged on. “You were going to tell him anyway. The process got moved up a month, that’s all.”

  She kept shaking her head.

  “I’m sure I can catch on as a temporary instructor somewhere,” I continued. “For the spring semester. There are lots of schools that would love to have me. I’m always getting feelers.” I forced a smile.

  “I can’t leave here,” she said.

  “What?” I took a sip of my coffee. It tasted terrible, metallic and oily. “This is a free country, you can go anywhere you want.”

  “I’ve lived in Texas all my life.” She wasn’t looking at me; she couldn’t. She was staring out the window, at the big rigs rolling down the road. They were going somewhere. She wasn’t—she was stuck.

  “I’m from here. All my family’s here. My friends. My life. I can’t just up and leave all that, for a man who doesn’t even have a job anymore.” She hesitated. “A man who’ll leave me soon enough anyway, once he realizes how fast I’m aging.”

  Self-pity was the last thing we needed now. “We’ve been through that, honey.” I pulled her chin around, forced her to turn and look at me. “That’s not what it’s about for me. You know that by now.”

  Her eyes started tearing, big silent drops running down her cheeks. “I can’t leave, Fritz. Not like this.”

  That got me mad, and I had to express it. “What do you want, an amicable separation served up on a silver platter? Shit, Marnie, my whole fucking career’s in the toilet, not just your marriage. We need each other, now more than ever.”

  She pulled some tissues from her purse and dabbed at her eyes. “I’m sorry. This has all turned out so badly.”

  I tried to comfort her as best I could. “That’s how it is . . . now. But it’ll get better. It can’t get any worse. Sooner or later I’ll get another job, a good one, we can settle in somewhere, start our life. In the meantime, we’ll work it out. People do. You’re a strong woman, you can handle this.” I said that with as much conviction as I could, because I was beginning to doubt it.

  She shook her head. “No. I’m not strong at all.”

  I leaned back against the cracked Naugahyde, exhausted. I’d had an awful sixteen hours, and things weren’t getting any better. “What’re you trying to tell me?”

  She didn’t pull her punch. “That it’s not going to work.”

  I wasn’t buying that—I couldn’t. “It has to, Marnie. We don’t have any other choices.”

  Her gaze went to the window again. “Mark wants to take me back.”

  That took my breath away, hearing that. “You can’t go back. Not after . . .” I put my hands on her shoulders, pulled her around to face me. “You love me. You can’t walk away from that. You can’t . . . we can’t not be together . . . you love me, I know that you love me. We love each other . . .”

  I heard myself babbling semicoherently, thinking “shut the fuck up, fool,” and not being able to. I ground to a halt. “We love each other. We can’t not be together.”

  She shook her head, a tiny shake. “And we can’t be together.”

  I felt myself melting away. I was going to be a puddle of crap on this dirty linoleum floor, and the busboy was going to mop me away.

  Now it was she who took my hands in hers. “If I leave Mark for you, I’ll have nothing. I signed a prenuptial agreement when we got married. He’ll cut me off, I won’t even have the clothes on my back. He’s a brutal, vindictive man when he’s crossed. He’ll bury us. I know, I’ve seen him do it.”

  “So how can you think of staying with a man like that?” I was so fucked up I couldn’t think crooked, let alone straight.

  “Because he loves me. Or what passes for love for him. And he wants me to. He doesn’t want the humiliation of my leaving him.”

  “Fuck that. He’ll get over it. Or he won’t, it’s not our problem anymore.”

  “It’s my problem, Fritz. There’s no way around that.”

  Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. “So are you saying . . . what are you saying, Marnie?” Don’t say it, I was praying.

  She said it.

  “It’s over, Fritz. You and me.”

  By that time I didn’t know what I was feeling, or even if I was feeling. “You can’t live without me. That’s why we did what we did. Because we had to. You can’t live without love, Marnie. You lived your life without it, but now you’ve tasted that apple. We can’t turn back now. I can’t, and neither can you.”

  She tried to smile, but it wouldn’t come. She looked like a clown with the tears streaking her face, her lower eyelids charcoal-black from lack of sleep.

  “I couldn’t, you’re right. But now I’m going to have to. There’s no other way for me. I know it makes me sound like a materialistic bitch, but I’m into a style of life too deeply to leave it.”

  Love conquers all, I thought as I looked at her. Except when it doesn’t.

  “If you had kept your job, if we could have stayed here—”

  I cut her off. “Given the circumstances, that never was a possibility, which you had to know.” My anger started rising again. “Why didn’t you tell me you were married to the fucking dean of the medical school? A doctor, that’s all you said. Shit, that’s like saying your husband shoots hoops, but you don’t mention that he’s Michael Jordan. How could you ever have thought we could slip away into the night?”

  “Because if I had told you, you would have left me. We would never have been involved like we were . . . are,” she caught herself. She was already thinking of us in the past tense. “You never would have gotten involved with me, would you?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I wouldn’t have. It doesn’t matter, I did.”

  “It was selfish,” she admitted. “I couldn’t bear not to have you, from that first night we were together, even before we made love. I thought . . . hoped . . . childishly, I know, that somehow it would work out.”

  “Like what? He’d die of a heart attack or something?”

  She started crying again. I wasn’t so sympathetic anymore. She’d burned me down for a temporary pleasure she knew couldn’t be lasting. And she hadn’t clued me in, she’d made me her unknowing accomplice. Now we were finished, according to her, as was my career and my entire life. Shattered pieces, dust under my feet.

  “So you’re going back to the mansions and the Jaguars and the diamonds and a sterile bed.”

  She stared blankly out the dirt-streaked window at the shitty morning.

  “Until when?” I lost it then, I wasn’t going to hold back anymore. “Until the next poor asshole comes along and shelters you from the storm?”

  “Don’t, Fritz. Please don’t.”

 
“Don’t what? Make you feel bad? Shit, Marnie, you’ve ruined my entire fucking life! No job, no you, nada. What am I supposed to do, act gallantly? Stiff upper lip, like Shane or some other horseshit movie? This is my life, godfuckingdamn you! My life!”

  That outburst emptied whatever air was left out of my balloon. I couldn’t help it—I reached for her and hugged her. She went limp in my arms.

  We stood inside the lunchroom foyer, waiting for the cab the waitress had called for her. A couple of truckers came in and sat down at the counter. One of them dropped some coins into the jukebox.

  “I’ll have a blue . . . Christmas . . . without you . . .” Elvis at his most mournful. Talk about shitty, prophetic coincidence.

  Marnie started crying again. I pulled her to me and held her tight. What else could I do?

  The bottle of tequila is empty. There’s other stuff in the house, but that’s it for tonight. Tomorrow, I think, I’ll start cutting back. Booze has never been a big deal with me. I’d rather get stoned than high on liquor, it doesn’t hurt my head so much the day after.

  While Johanna was here I was able to blot out the murder. Now that I’m alone I can’t, it’s here with me, in the house. Not only in my head, but literally, on film.

  I know I should do something. It’s immoral not to. Tell Roach, or go to the cops. But if I do that, I’m right back where I vowed I wouldn’t be: involved.

  It already might be too late to tell Roach. If I was going to, I should have figured out how to do it this evening. Now, if he ever does find out, he’ll think I’m an asshole and a flake. He’ll be joining a sizable list.

  I guess I’m going to have to go to the cops; but I sure as hell don’t want to. I imagine the sequence of future events—it’s scary. Getting involved means going public, which means I would be exposed. Being exposed means becoming a target. If the mysterious murderer could kill someone he obviously knew, in such a cold-blooded manner, he certainly could do it to me without thinking twice.

  The tree fell in the woods and no one heard it, so it didn’t make a sound. I’ll rest on that chickenshit solipsism for a few days, until I figure out how to buck up my courage and do the right thing.

  Buster Reilly, who I roomed with at Yale and is still one of my closest friends, is a partner at Parkinson, Miller, and Clements, one of D.C.’s gigantic law firms, the kind that has two or three former cabinet members on board so they can make gazillions a year hand-holding multinational conglomerates and lobbying for foreign governments. Although their practice is primarily corporate, they also have an excellent criminal law division. That’s Buster’s turf. Fred Thompson, the former actor and before that Watergate counselor, now a U.S. senator from Tennessee, told Larry King that if he ever needed a criminal lawyer, Buster would be at the top of his list. That’s how highly esteemed my old buddy is.

  The firm’s offices are on four floors of a high-rise at the edge of Foggy Bottom, a few blocks west of the George Washington University campus. Buster can walk to the office from his Georgetown brownstone, which he does. He’s a big, strong guy, very fit (he was on the Yale crew, too); he works out in the firm’s private gym at lunchtime. He’s been on me to shape up, as I’ve gone a bit flabby these past months, living out in the sticks by myself and drinking too much. I keep meaning to add a training regimen to my list of need-to-dos. So far, I haven’t progressed past running a couple miles two or three days a week; it’s too damn hot, and I don’t have the facilities that are available to Buster. Come fall, when the weather slacks off, I’ll pick up my exercise program—another item on my to-do list. It’s getting to be a longer and longer list.

  “So what’s so important you drag yourself all the way up here in this god-awful weather instead of talking to me on the phone?” Buster asks.

  We’re sitting in his corner office, which has the nice view of the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials and the Potomac River. I’d told him yesterday, over the phone, that I might have a problem and wanted to discuss it in person. As usual, Buster’s in the middle of a bunch of big cases, but he’s making time to see me. He even asked his secretary to hold his calls, to show me he’s taking me seriously. Buster knows about what happened to me down in Texas; we’ve drunk several cases of beer commiserating and discussing. He’s optimistic about me—he’s sure I’ll bounce back. I appreciate having that kind of friend in my corner. There aren’t many of them.

  “Before I get into specifics,” I say for starters, “let me ask a hypothetical question.”

  “Ask away.”

  “If I see a crime being committed, I’m obligated to go to the police, right?”

  He gives me a sideways look. “This is hypothetical?”

  “Hypothetical, right.”

  He leans back. “The answer to your hypothetical question is no.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “Even if—”

  “The question isn’t hypothetical?”

  “Let’s say.”

  “The answer is still no.”

  I want to make sure I’ve got this right. “So a witness to a crime doesn’t have to come forward.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “What if . . .” I hesitate.

  “What if what?”

  “A witness to a crime has evidence that the crime was committed.”

  “Like what kind?”

  “Oh, I don’t know . . . a taped phone conversation, some documentary records . . .”

  “Still no,” he says.

  “So there are no circumstances under which a witness to a crime has to go to the police.”

  “Not voluntarily,” he counsels me.

  “What’s the difference?”

  “No one has to come forward and give evidence that a crime was committed. It goes back to English common law, the right to privacy. In this country, it comes out of the Wild West tradition, where the only law was a gun. If a man had to come forward and give testimony that he’d seen a crime, he could become a crime victim himself. Understand?”

  “Completely,” I answer. That had been my concern—that in getting involved in the killing at Roach’s farm I’d become a target. Now my friend the crack lawyer tells me it’s legal for me to protect my ass.

  “On the other hand,” Buster continues, “if the authorities think you have evidence, and ask you about it, and you lie and say you don’t, then you are in trouble, because you’d be committing perjury. It wouldn’t be about not reporting this hypothetical crime, it would be in lying about it if you’re asked directly.”

  I relax and sip from the excellent cup of coffee Buster’s secretary gave me before she closed the door to his office behind us.

  “You’re not in any trouble, are you?” Buster’s concerned about me, given my recent history.

  “No,” I assure him. “No trouble.”

  “This theoretical crime . . . to your knowledge, has anyone else come forward about it?”

  I shake my head. “As far as I know, no one else saw it. Theoretically.”

  He looks at me quizzically. “The police don’t know about it?”

  “I don’t see how.”

  “In that case, you definitely don’t come forward.”

  “If something like this ever happens to me,” I assure him, “I’ll do just that.”

  “Make sure. Don’t forget.”

  “I won’t.”

  Buster regards me with a skeptical eye. “You’re a crazy fucker, Fritz. You’ve always taken chances for the sake of . . . taking chances. In this case—this hypothetical case—don’t,” he warns me sternly. “I’m telling you this as your friend and your lawyer. I don’t want to have to pull your ashes out of the fire because of the old ‘Fritz couldn’t help himself’ syndrome.”

  I nod vigorously in agreement. “Not to worry. I’ve put away my childish things.” I hold two fingers up in the Scout’s honor salute.

  Buster smiles. “So what else is happening in your life?” he asks, leaving the subject behind us
. “Any job prospects?”

  “I’m not looking currently. I’m not ready yet.”

  “Don’t let it get cold,” he advises me. “Out of sight, out of mind.”

  “I know. It’ll be soon—don’t worry.”

  “How’s your love life? You getting enough?” Buster’s a bachelor, like me. He’s very popular with the ladies.

  “As much as I can handle. I met a nice woman at a party my mother threw last week. She’s from Boston, though, and she has serious intentions.”

  He smiles. “Hardly your type.”

  “No.” Actually, I have been thinking about Johanna. But he’s right. I’m too much of a fuckup for a serious contender like her.

  “How is your mom?” Buster asks, changing the subject again. Like all of my friends who know her, he’s fond of my mother.

  “Feisty as ever.” I pause. “Hey,” I say, as if the thought just now occurred to me. “She had this fellow at her party, her guest of honor, so to speak. James Roach. He’s a wheel in the State Department. You know him at all?”

  Buster’s expression darkens. “Yes, I know him. He’s close to some of the senior partners here, the big rainmakers. Why?”

  “He bought a farm adjacent to ours, part of our original property. Recently, less than a year ago. He built a runway on it big enough to land jets, just bought a big expensive sailboat. Likes to brag on himself. He wants to take me out sailing.”

  “Make sure you’re wearing a life jacket,” Buster says dourly.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Short and sweet: the guy’s a world-class prick.”

  I’m taken aback. I found Roach somewhat pompous, but he didn’t arouse such visceral, angry passion in me. “He did seem a little nutty about terrorists under the bed,” I say, “but he was pleasant, heavy on the charm. My mother was all ga-ga over him. All the old ladies were.”

  “Your mother would find something nice to say about Pol Pot.” Buster shakes his head. “‘Prick’ is the wrong word. ‘Motherfucker’ might fit him better.”

  “A close personal friend, I take it.”

  “Yeah, like Hannibal Lecter. I’m not shitting you, Fritz, he may be charming and all that at a party, but he is not a nice man. He’d cut you off at the knees if you crossed him. I know people he’s left for dead at the side of the road.”