Time passed. Time always passes.
One afternoon my friend received a call from a man who identified himself as a cop. He said, Hello, and used her first name, Sandra, and asked her sternly:
—Are you parking illegally, Sandra, because if you are, and you don’t remove your car from the lot right now—I’m giving you ten minutes—I’ll have to arrest you.
My friend hung up, threw on her coat, ran out the door to the lot, and drove her car far away. Then she phoned me and told me what happened. She was terrified. She thought the cop might show up and arrest her at any moment, she thought she’d be taken to jail.
—That was no cop, I said.
—How do you know? she asked.
—A cop wouldn’t phone you and give you a warning, I answered. But I was worried that I might be wrong, and that she might be arrested.
—And he’s not going to say he’s going to give you a second chance, because you don’t get second chances if you’re doing something illegal and they find out, unless they’re corrupt, and he wouldn’t say, I’m a cop. He’d give his name and rank or something.
My friend listened, annoyed that I was calm, and she wasn’t satisfied or convinced. She thought she might be under surveillance and would be busted later. She owed thousands of dollars in tickets in two states. It might be a sting operation, something convoluted. I had to convince her she was not in danger of going to jail. I told her I had an idea and hung up.
It was simple. I’d call a precinct and ask the desk cop how a cop would identify himself over the phone. I’d learn the protocol, how cops wouldn’t do what that so-called cop had done, allay my friend’s fears, and also show her I was taking her anxiety seriously.
I looked up precincts in the telephone book and chose one in the West Village, where I thought they’d be used to handling unusual questions.
—Tenth precinct, Sergeant Molloy, the desk cop said.
—Hi, I have a question, I said.
—Yeah.
—How do police identify themselves over the phone?
—What do you mean? Molloy asked.
—If a cop calls you, what does he say?
—What do you mean, what does he say?
—I mean, how does he say he’s a policeman? What’s the official way to do it? The desk cop was silent for a few seconds.
—A cop called you. What’d he say? What’d he want?
—He didn’t call me, he called a friend.
—What did he say to your friend?
I couldn’t hang up, because I wouldn’t get the information I wanted. If I hung up, Molloy could have the call traced. I’d be in trouble for making harassing calls to precincts, which would be extremely ironic.
—He said to her… he said, Hello, I’m the police.
—Yeah. Then what?
—And then, then he said…
I didn’t want to tell him the story, give my friend’s real name, tell him about her tickets in two states, and her car being parked illegally, and her bribing the guy in the corporate lot. But I had to give him some sense of the situation in order to get the information I needed.
—He said to her, Hi, Diana. Hi, I’m the police. Then he said, he said, Diana… Diana… have you done anything wrong lately?
There was a very long silence.
—Have you done anything wrong lately? Molloy repeated.
It was weird coming from a cop’s mouth. He gathered his thoughts, while I remained breathlessly quiet.
—A police officer wouldn’t say that, Molloy answered soberly. A police officer wouldn’t say that.
—He wouldn’t, I repeated, just as gravely.
The cop thought again, for a longer time.
—Listen, I want you to let me know if he ever calls your friend again. Because a cop shouldn’t do that… He trailed off.
—That guy’s impersonating an officer.
—Oh, yeah. I’m sure he won’t… he probably won’t call her again. But if he does, I’ll phone you immediately, I promise.
—You do that, Molloy said.
—I will. Thanks, I said.
—Yeah, he said. Maybe Molloy didn’t believe any of this, but he did the whole thing straight.
I called my friend, and we stayed on the phone for hours, laughing about how crazy I was to say “Have you done anything wrong lately?” to a cop, with all its implications, and we laughed about her racing out of her house to the corporate lot, jumping into her car and driving off in search of a legal parking space as if she were being chased by the devil.
Maybe the devil was chasing her and me. Because we laughed off and on for about a year more, and then we had less to laugh about, and then nothing to laugh about. I don’t know, we grew to distrust each other, and stopped being friends. Maybe Molloy laughed later.
Give Us Some Dirt
On long, summer nights in Pin Point, the Georgia air hung still as a corpse, and they’d wait for a breeze to save them. The heat felt like another skin on Clarence. His Mother would say, Clarence, what have you been up to? Playing by the river again? Oh Lord, we’ve got to clean you up for church, but aren’t you something to behold? And his mother would clap her palms together or spread her arms wide, like their preacher. Oh, Lord, she’d exclaim. Sometimes she’d point to sister and lovingly scold, “She doesn’t get up to trouble like you, son.” Clarence scrubbed the mud off until his knuckles nearly bled, while his sister giggled.
These days she wasn’t laughing so much.
The dirt couldn’t be washed away, not after Clarence kneeled in their white church, and they slimed him with derision. They couldn’t see who he was, how hard he’d worked, what he’d had to do, but he knew how to act. Behave yourself, boy, Daddy would say. Clarence’s grandfather, Clarence called him Daddy, was a strict, righteous man, who never complained, not even during segregation times, didn’t say a word, so Clarence wouldn’t, either. Those days were over, and they had their freedom now. He set Daddy’s bust on a shelf near his desk in his new office.
The D.C. nights mortified him, the air as suffocating as Pin Point’s. Clarence couldn’t free himself of history’s stench. On some interminable evenings, he nearly sent that woman a message, made the call, because she’d dragged him down for their delectation. He’d pick up the receiver and put it down.
The noise of the ceiling fan assaulted him like a swarm of bugs. Clarence’s jaw locked, and his strong hands balled into fists. Every pornographic day of his trial, Clarence’s wife, Virginia, sat quietly behind him. She barely moved for hours on end, didn’t betray anything, and he worried that, if she had, the calumnies would have spread even further, and the sniggers and whispers would have ripped her and him to pieces. He rubbed his face, recalling her startling composure. Rigid, at attention, a soldier in his beleaguered army.
He didn’t tell Virginia what the senators whispered—if he’d tried to marry her, if they’d had sex before the Court decided Loving v. Virginia, they’d have been arrested, and wasn’t it ironic—the Court made Clarence’s dick legal in Virginia, in Virginia? The Capitol’s dirty joke. Their dry Yankee lips cracked into bloodless grins.
The room’s high ceilings dwarfed him. Clarence glanced at a stack of legal papers. His wife was unassailable and white, but under their vicious spotlight her skin looked pasty and sick. She clung to him through his humiliation, even when disgrace lingered like the smell of shit. And now she bore the tainted mark with him.
Clarence had absorbed Daddy’s lessons, he could keep everything inside, all of it. He watched his grandfather’s bust, half expecting it to move, but it only stared down at him from the shelf. Clarence picked the receiver up again and put it down again. He was in that weird trance, and breathed in slowly, to calm himself, and breathed out slowly, to stay calm, and then closed his eyes. Clarence would leave that woman alone, leave her be, and, anyway, what was the sense, what was there to say years later, and there’d be consequences.
He was weary of scrubbing.
When he won, when the seat was his, he watched his friends’ joy, black and white, and they embraced him, slapped him on the back—remember what’s important, what it’s for, our principles, it’s all worth it. Clarence was the blackest Supreme Court justice in the land, the blackest this country would ever see. He held that inside him, too, and patted his round belly.
Clarence liked to joke about his heft, his gravitas, with his friends and the other Justices. When he delivered his rare speeches, he occasionally mentioned his girth, which drew a laugh, since his body was a source of mirth. Sometimes his hands rested on his stomach during sessions, when he was courtly if mute. The court watchers noted that he never asked questions, they remarked on it until they finally stopped. Clarence felt he didn’t have to say a word. He’d talk if he wanted, and he preferred not to.
When his hair turned white, like Clinton’s, that other fallen brother, Virginia said he looked distinguished, not old. Still, she worried about his weight, she didn’t want to lose him. He hushed her. He intended to be on the bench as long as he could, at least as long as Thurgood Marshall. He looked at Daddy again, eternally silenced, and sometimes talked to him, telling him almost everything. Clarence could hear Daddy, he could hear his voice always. He knew what he’d say.
Clarence’s trial bulged fat inside him. He’d never forget his ordeal, not a moment of it. He closed his briefcase and felt the urge to push Daddy from his perch. He would never let anyone forget his trial. Clarence chuckled suddenly, and a harsh, guttural noise escaped from him like a runaway slave. He’d have the last laugh, he was color blind, and they’d all pay in the end.
The title “Give Us Some Dirt” is taken from Clarence Thomas’ testimony during the hearings, October 1991.
Playing Hurt
Abigail planned on retiring at forty and kidded around with her friends about how she’d better lay her golden eggs fast. But all bearers of wishes and jokes are also serious. In the future, she would be her own benevolent despot, spend what she had accumulated, and indulge herself. Maybe study Chinese or Arabic, certainly Latin, shave her head, if she wanted, because, literally, she would have earned it.
From her desk, Abigail reveled in the Chrysler Building’s beautiful austerity, the sun dropping away in its own time. She admired nature’s independence. Her Harvard Law School friends wondered why she worked in an investment bank, no adventure, no social meaning, they teased her, but she believed everyone had a right to happiness, and that took money. Mostly her friends came from privileged families and didn’t have her special fervor, so, in a crucial way, they didn’t get her. But as a scholarship student, Abigail grew up observing them and learned to recognize the secret operations of class and power.
Nathaniel Murphy walked past her glassed-in office. He still had most of his hair, his good looks, he was almost too handsome, though his nose had thickened since she’d first seen his picture when he was twenty-eight. The Internet golden boy had grown fleshier, even as his world had shrunk, but there he was in his Armani suit. She could smell his aftershave lotion, Vervain probably.
The numbers on the accounts blurred, Abigail pushed her glasses to the bridge of her nose, thrust her face closer to the papers, and self-consciously tugged on her short skirt. He was headed to the vault, distracted or worried, she thought, and he should be. He would soon open a security box, which probably held birth certificates, his parents’ wills, some gold, jewelry, certificates. Abigail had helped the elder Mr. Murphy draw up his will; he had left most of his fortune to charitable foundations, but his son’s fortune had vanished, along with other dot-commers.
Nathaniel Murphy stayed in her imagination. His fall had been dramatic, public, and she wondered at his profligacy and hubris. While the sun sank at its own speed, Abigail imagined the younger Murphy’s hand hitting the sides of the metal security box. He was in a dark hole, yet everything surrounding him gleamed. He was like a character from a Patricia Highsmith novel, not Ripley, but others whose guilt registered on a human stock market. Abigail felt she had suffered too much to be guilty about anything, but Nathaniel had cost people millions, he’d wasted everything he had from birth and more. Being poor again terrified her, the thought made her sick, but he had no idea what it was like, and, rather than provoking resentment, it added allure to his mystery, even innocence.
The elder Mr. Murphy once revealed that Nate’s wife had asked for a divorce right after the crash. He couldn’t help him, Nate made terrible choices; he gambled, not invested; he’s a playboy, his father confided, with time to kill. He’s drinking too much, and the girls sail in and out of his life. She liked Mr. Murphy, who was a gentleman, but she would have protected his son better, guided him. Abigail kept close watch on her own money, talked to her broker daily, and flushed with warmth when, each month, she saw her accounts swell.
A guard closed the vault’s massive doors behind Nate. He turned a corner and walked down a hall, where Abigail encountered him. Abigail hadn’t planned it, she’d gone to the women’s room, and their paths crossed. They had several times before, when they would nod indifferently, but Abigail was never indifferent, she’d admit later. This time she stopped, and he did also.
—I’m sorry about your father, I liked him, Abigail said.
—Thank you, he said. He liked you, too.
She had never noticed how green his brown eyes were, almost olive, then she realized they were just standing, not talking, and she must have been staring into his eyes. She tugged at her short skirt, meaning to return to her office, when he smiled familiarly at her.
—You like it here?
—Sure, I’m here, yes, I do.
—They let you wear short skirts.
—I wear what I want.
Five weeks later, the younger Mr. Murphy moved in.
That first night in a corner of the bar at the Hotel Pierre, Nathaniel kissed her with restrained ardor, and Abigail knew much more inhabited him. He told her about his insecurity because of his father’s reputation, she told him her mother cleaned houses, her father couldn’t keep a job. But what mattered was being close to him. The next night, he whispered words that infuriated her, yet her breath stopped anyway. He’d been in love with her since he first saw her, his father told him she was the one, and with him her life would be happy—I am happy, she said—he could make her happier, babies, if she wanted, millions of orgasms. I’ve heard that in hundreds of movies, Abigail said, maybe not the bit about orgasms. After he kissed her without restraint, Abigail lost the sense of where she was. I’m not a movie, Nathaniel muttered into her ear, I’m just a soft touch for you. Curiously, she saw old Mr. Murphy in him.
You’re the soft touch, her friends insisted, you’re nuts, he’ll screw you. They’d never seen Abigail like this, she had never felt like this. You’ll wash his stocks at night, her best friend quipped, but nothing swayed Abigail. Against her exasperated friends’ advice, Nate moved in.
They were happy. What her friends hadn’t realized was that Nate was crazy about Abigail, devoted. He lived up to his promises, she told them, he quit drinking completely, and every week he took meetings with smart entrepreneurs like himself. She knew both his desire and his drive, they both loved the game of business, and she adored him, he made her swoon. With her, she knew he’d succeed, and Nate told her he’d thrown away his little black book. But Nate had seen that in too many corny movies, so actually it went into the security box, a document of his bachelorhood, Abigail wouldn’t mind.
They married in a mauve room in the Hotel Pierre, where her friends and his celebrated, his dotty mother in attendance, Abigail’s family discreetly absent. A few days before, almost as a joke, they had signed a prenuptial agreement. It didn’t mean anything; she was a lawyer, that was all. The newlyweds were delirious. She felt sexy and content with him, he felt like a man again.
Abigail’s clients loved her, she helped them, a few lost big, there was some ruin, some bankruptcies, but, bottom line, she made money for the firm. A partnership came
next. There was hardly time for sex, though Nate persisted in wanting to add to Abigail’s orgasm account, as they called it. She turned him away once, saying, I’d prefer you made money, like, Make money not love. He was shocked and angry, and she took it back, but he was hurt, even wounded. You’re soft, his father used to say, toughen up. Abigail tried to soothe him, but really she wanted him working, back on his feet, emotional support was one thing, financial another. She saw him retreat a little, but he’d come back, he’d understand. She didn’t notice his drinking, he hid it, doing it only when she was at work or asleep. Now, less and less, he wanted to have sex, and she was too tired anyway.
Nate’s best friend at Princeton called with a brilliant idea, and since Nate owned the sharpest biz head he knew, he wanted him as a partner, if Nate liked what he heard, and he did—an environmentally important and scientifically significant venture to develop microbes that absorb waste in the ocean. Nate needed a couple of million to invest, not much really, but he didn’t have it. He would borrow it from Abigail, be told his friend, he’d pay her back when the business saw its first profits. She trusts me, Nate told him.
Later, Abigail unlocked the door to Nate’s embrace. He repeated the conversation, every word, with embellishment more bubbly than the champagne he’d opened. She looked into his olive eyes, at his too-handsome face, and her friends’ and his father’s admonitions returned, as if written upon that face. He would use her, leave her, he’d take her money, he was a playboy. She fought her fear, an instinct maybe, after all she must love Nate, her husband, she should help him to succeed. Even so, she told him she needed time to think, because that kind of money was serious. Nate was stunned. Abigail saw disbelief in his eyes or weakness, like in her father’s eyes, a beaten dog’s eyes, in bed, far from Nate, Abigail dreamed someone was trying to kill her. Nate couldn’t sleep.
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