One of the elevators wasn’t working, so she waited a long while, watched the crowd take their time unloading when the car eventually arrived, and jumped in, taking a hit from the impatient doors. On the thirty-fourth floor nobody was at the reception desk as she passed by to pick up her messages.
Early evening fog flowed into the high canyons of the Financial District outside her office window. Across the street, also thirty-four floors up, she could see fellow office workers hanging on the phone, rushing around with papers in their hands, holding meetings in their conference room, which looked a lot like her firm’s conference room. Watching her competitors across the chasm, she was reminded of Bobby’s hamster, Cheeky, circling in her wheel through the monotonous night.
Before she could pick up the phone, Mel Akers, one of the senior partners, came in.
"Heard you were back, Nina. How’d it go today?"
"Get ready, Mel. I’m ninety-nine percent sure I won."
"Oh. Good job, Nina."
"Maybe one last chance for this appellant to get out and straighten up. Let’s hope there’s no fourth strike. I never thought he deserved life in prison for what he did, Mel. He’s not a bad guy, just a loser."
"Not today though, huh, Nina? You deserve a pat on the back."
She smiled at the thought, at his unusually unenthusiastic reaction. She had more to say, but he clearly didn’t want to hear details. A win in the Appeals Court counted for more points than most wins. She had expected Mel to invite her out for a celebratory drink, at the least.
"Can I sit down, Nina?"
"Sure, Mel," she replied, instantly sensitive to this departure from routine. Mel usually had a quick joke for her, and then flashed off down the hall to spread it before she could. Instead he tapped his well-manicured fingers on her desk like he did just before a big court appearance.
"I have some tough news, Nina. You know how mid-size firms are having to specialize to keep up with all the new laws that get passed each year? And the recession is killing our clients. Hardly anybody pays anymore. They just sue us if they lose. We should have gone to medical school. Then people wouldn’t hate us so much."
"Maybe so."
"Malpractice insurance eats up half our profits."
"Yep."
"And the State Bar, they’ve got this new industry, inventing new ethics rules and sending their stone-faced inquisitors around to haunt honest practitioners...."
"So ... what’s your point, Mel?" Nina said.
"Well, you know, at the partners’ meeting last week we decided we had been a bit hasty opening up a couple of departments. With the economy like it is we have to consolidate our resources. The days of the general-practice firm are numbered."
Mel’s watery eyes behind their specs looked slightly past her, out the window, as though she were becoming as insubstantial as the fog outside.
"Unfortunately, we don’t feel we should try to keep our appellate and family law departments going anymore. That’s you and Francine Chu. We just don’t have the depth."
"Huh."
"It’s nothing personal. You’ve done a great job."
"So where are you putting me?" The firm had other departments—corporations, taxation, securities, insurance defense—where the money was, and the turgid paperwork that drove lawyers mad.
"Well, we might be able to fit you into our construction litigation department. Ralph Teeter is looking for someone. I don’t know if you have the interest." Now his eyes located her. Would she stay or would she go?
"What else do you have?"
"Nothing, unfortunately. Francine has decided to join her uncle in private practice in Marin County."
So Francie was leaving, her best friend at the firm. That hurt.
Soul-sucking work, construction litigation. Her professional life would consist of endless depositions of soil-subsidence experts and aerated-concrete engineers. She would become an expert on dirt, roofing materials, cracked and shifting foundations. It was big business in California. The quickie subdivisions of the eighties had led to the latent-defect litigation of the nineties. The lawyers took their tithe whether the construction was good or bad.
"Ralph Teeter’s getting on to seventy now, isn’t he?" He needed a strong, healthy, workaholic flunky. He would never retire. He lived with his ninety-two-year-old mother and he was well-known for arriving at the office every day at six-thirty A.M. "I’m not sure Ralph and I would be a good mix," Nina said.
"Well. Think about it. I’m authorized to offer you a three-month severance package should you decide to ... uh, seek new opportunities. Of course, we’d be sorry to see you leave. Obviously, you’ve done good work for us, Nina."
"A generous offer," Nina said. Mel relaxed visibly. He must be thinking Nina was not going to get hardnosed on him. She would bow out gracefully, not sue for wrongful termination. "Six months’ severance would be even more generous," she continued.
"I don’t know if the partners would go for it."
"Six months, and medical insurance for the rest of the year."
"I suppose I could propose it, but I—"
"Think about it," Nina said. Within an hour Mel called back and agreed.
She left at six, early for her, fighting the traffic back to Bernal Heights, taking forty-five minutes to drive what she could have walked in twenty. Her son grabbed her and absorbed her attention from the minute she walked in until, homework done and bath completed, he got tucked into bed. She pulled out a bottle of Clos du Bois blanc and made good progress on it for the rest of the evening, waiting for her husband. When Jack came home, looking tired and tense, she was lying on the couch in the dark living room, the glimmering city lights her only illumination. He gave her a distracted kiss and disappeared into the kitchen.
When she finally got to the bedroom a few hours later, he was snoring. She poked him. He lurched over to his quiet side, still buried in his dream. Too tired and dispirited to wake him, she composed a new day in her mind, saying witty, powerful things to Mel, coming off even better than she had. She didn’t get to sleep until late. When the alarm rang at six-thirty, Jack was already gone.
The next day, in jeans, mustering the bravado she usually saved for the courtroom, she went back to Montgomery Street to clean out her desk and arrange for her cases to be transferred. People she had joked around with for five years wore solemn expressions. Her farewell luncheon felt like a wake. Jack didn’t get back to the condo until almost ten, and went immediately to bed.
In the morning, he joined her at the table on the deck that sat on piers overhanging a cliff. The city towers, rectangled, pyramidal, and mirrored, bathed in their usual silvery morning light, looked exotic as ancient castles and as remote from her.
"Cold out here," he said.
"Yes, it is." Nina set her orange juice glass solidly in the middle of the railing, respectful of the distance between it and the ground.
He picked up the newspaper, apparently contented with this repartee, and began to read.
"Jack, I’ve got to talk to you."
The way he slapped the paper down told her he would rather not have a conversation. "Okay." He folded the paper and refilled his coffee cup. "What about?"
"They let me go." The shock on his face made telling him almost worth the wait. "Mel gave me the bad news the day before yesterday."
"Jesus, Nina. Jesus. This is terrible."
Instead of feeling gratified by his response, she found herself vaguely disquieted.
"I squeezed six months’ severance out of them," she went on, but Jack was still shaking his head in disbelief.
"You didn’t do a damned thing to deserve this, Nina."
"I’m almost sure I won the appeal too. Judge Ritty asked a question about their citations that gave a pretty clear indication of the Court’s direction on the judgment."
He said nothing, just pulled on his mustache.
"What would they have done if I had lost it? You have to wonder." Her lightness didn’t help.
He pulled her hand across the table, squeezing too hard, shifting into a mood that had recently become familiar, which she realized suddenly she did not like, a mood that was intended to comfort her and instead felt awkward, as though they were strangers.
"Bastards," he said, his voice crisp and workmanlike. "Listen. I’ll call Drew. He knows a shark who’ll bloody them for you."
"I’m not going to sue."
"You can’t let them get away with this."
"I’m ready to go, Jack. I need a change. I thought it might be good for us...."
"You need a job."
"We can make it for a few months without if we have to. What are you so afraid of? That I won’t be able to get another job?"
"Of course. Of course I’m afraid you won’t be able to get another goddamn job." He got up. Throwing his napkin onto the table, he jostled her glass with his elbow. It went over, falling in a long, quiet moment during which they looked at each other in mutual dismay. The sound of glass shattering, when it came, seemed distant and anticlimactic.
The violence of Jack’s reaction lingered with Nina all day. He was out of the house the next morning, dropping Bobby off at school by the time she woke up. That night and the next, he came home after one in the morning. When she stayed up very late the second night and tried to talk to him in bed, he yelled that he needed his rest, he had court in the morning, and turned over to sleep.
Which possibly explained why, on Nina’s third full day at home for the first time in five years, she was feeling lonely down to the soles of her feet. She had nowhere to go and nothing to do except laundry. The frustration and despair that had smoldered for days made her by turns restless and apathetic. Home free. She ought to start looking for a job. Instead she got a load of clothes going. She took a long shower, returning to find sudsy water undulating across the kitchen floor. Calling the condo plumbing service, she parked herself on the couch with the newspaper to keep her company.
Within an hour there was a knock on the door. She got up and opened it. The condo’s plumber came in smiling, and looked her up and down. Making a gesture of vanity suitable to his youth, he reached up to his hair, next to the golden-brown eyes and big nose, setting a small silver cross in his ear swinging. She directed him to the mess and went back to curl up on the couch. When he was finished in the kitchen, he came in. He stood beside her, eyes on her shirt, on the place where her bra ought to be.
"What a shame, having to bill such a pretty lady," he said. The curtains were closed. The machine noise cut out abruptly, its stillness inspiring a shared recognition that nobody else was home.
"You listen to the ads, you’d think those old washers would go on forever," he said. "I put in a new hose, but you better start looking for a new machine." He showed her the cost of the hose on the bill, leaning his head in close to hers while his finger traced over each item. He smelled like detergent, fresh and fragrant from his labors.
Nina raised herself as gracefully as she could out of the plump cushions. She walked over to the table for her purse, aware of his eyes on her bare legs, aware of his body and the tight jeans over his rear end.
Turning, she found him close behind her, his long lashes narrowing around tiger eyes, the swinging earring hypnotizing. She had trouble getting her checkbook out. "Not feeling well today?" he said.
"Why do you ask?" she said.
"Last time I was here, you had to take off work to let me in. I remember." She scrounged through her bag as she recalled the occasion and the conversation they had had. He had lived in Bernal Heights all his life. He loved the City. He worked for his father, over on Valencia. He wanted to take over the business. He wanted to learn to be a pilot. He went hang gliding at Fort Funston every chance he got, finding a fling off a cliff about the most invigorating thing he could imagine. She knew so much about him. Why couldn’t she remember his name? While she considered, he edged in until the hairs on their arms touched.
His body so close to hers seemed larger, surrounding her with an aura of wild threat and protection she found herself unable to categorize or resist. Caught in the dangerous spell, she didn’t do the proper thing. She didn’t move away. "You have beautiful hair," he said, his hand reaching out to stroke it. "Brown like milk chocolate. Silky."
His hand slid under her head, lifting it, and then suddenly, he kissed her, wrapping his arms around her in a hug as warm as bear fur. His fingers touched her hair so softly, she felt soothed and thrilled at the same time. She found herself touching his earring with the tip of her finger, discarding the cool knowledge that she should not be doing this, tracing the curve of his ear instead. Somehow he had kicked off his shoes and he was on the couch with her, murmuring how nice she was, how beautiful, how smooth her skin felt. He moved around her with an easy familiarity, as though he had known her forever.
Dizzy with her own desire, she moved her hands down his back and heard him sigh. Then he stopped, moving only to turn his head to one side, then froze. Above the roaring in her blood she heard somebody saying, loudly, coldly, precisely, "So this is how it is. This is how it is." The boy jumped up and she tried to sit up, looking at her husband. For a long instant Jack stared at them with a look on his face she did not recognize. Then he turned away. The front door slammed.
"Sorry," the boy said. "This really sucks. Your old man?"
Nina had no reply.
He tied his high-tops and came over, rubbing her head lightly. "You going to be all right?"
"I’ll be all right."
"Your husband looked pretty pissed off. There’s no chance he’d ... hit you or something?"
"He’s a lawyer." Now, didn’t that say it all?
"Uh-oh. Worse." He started for the door and then turned back toward her, clearly reluctant, his face a question mark.
"Oh," said Nina. "I’ll leave the check under the mat, okay? You can pick it up later."
"Great," he said, ducking out of there. "And thank you for calling Jiffy Plumb."
Not funny. But she appreciated the gesture. She really did.
Ms. Cherry, a brisk-sounding woman who identified herself as Jack’s attorney, called her at home the next day.
"No, he’d prefer you don’t try to contact him at the hotel," she said.
"He has to talk to me sometime. He can’t just call it quits after five years without talking to me." Nina tried to sound businesslike and failed. "Jack loves to talk.... We can work this out, if he’ll just call me." She couldn’t believe she was pleading, groveling to this stranger. So that was how her divorce clients’ spouses felt when she called to notify them the locks were being changed and they’d be getting some papers.
"I’m afraid his decision is final," said Ms. Cherry, her tone neutral. "He has instructed me to file the petition for dissolution as soon as possible. I will be sending you a marital settlement agreement for your review. We’ll need to sell the condo."
The words impaled her. Just like that, she was going to lose her husband and her home. Correction. Not just her. Bobby. "I understand that Mr. McIntyre is not the boy’s biological father, and never formally adopted your son," the lawyer went on, reading her mind. "He wishes to maintain contact with him, and we would like to work out informal visitation."
"Well, you tell Mr. McIntyre that he can kiss my ass," Nina said.
"I’m sorry you feel that way," Ms. Cherry said. Nina used that line, too, when people had tantrums over the phone at work.
"He has to talk to me," Nina said. She hung up the phone and stood for a long time, her hand on it as though to pick it up again. She couldn’t think of anyone to call except Jack. Since she couldn’t do that, she wanted to run away to work, using it like exercise to relax her, but that option no longer existed. She walked out on the balcony. Pine needles from a tall tree on the hill behind their house twisted through the mist to speckle Jack’s blue canvas chair. An ambulance led by two police cars screamed along the street, bearing its unfortunate cargo to the hospital up the hill.
The w
eek before, she had been a married, respectable San Francisco attorney with a well-settled future. Now all she had was Bobby and her law degree.
If only she had agreed to work with Ralph Teeter. If only Jack hadn’t come home early.
If only she had done the grocery shopping instead of the laundry.
Strange days, indeed.
2
WHEN BAD THINGS happen, people often leave town. Also, they turn to their families. Nina’s brother, Matt, lived at Lake Tahoe, and he had a spare room. They drove there the next day.
She was pretending, for Bobby’s sake, that she was her usual self.
They ate lunch just north of Sacramento, at a big barn called Schulz’s, one of those self-consciously old-fashioned stores where you could buy candy straight from bins filled with licorice, saltwater taffy, and caramel corn. They ordered huge hamburgers. Bobby left most of his, cadged a pocketful of change, and dove into the noisy adjacent room with its kiddie rides and video games.
Nina sat at a nearby table, reading the news while she ate french fries. The governor wanted to cut welfare again and siphon off still more money earmarked for public schools— not bad enough for California to be next to last in spending on schools out of the fifty states. The deficit was worse than the legislative analysts had ever dreamed, at least before the election. Car-jackings were up; Apple Computer stock was way down. Still reeling from a series of earthquakes, fires, and coastal mudslides, California wasn’t recovering from the recession.
The second section told the horror stories, the ones about stalkers and molesters and new carcinogens found in the diet. Money and the environment and the pervasive aura of violence. Same old shit, Jack would say. You couldn’t take these things personally; they occurred on too vast a scale. Was the Golden State named for the Gold Rush or its dry, golden hillsides, she thought, zipping to the comic section, purposely redirecting her thoughts.
Her eyes fell upon Madame Zelda with her crystal ball, sitting in a dusty trance in her glass cabinet a few feet away. She got up and dropped in a quarter. Zelda’s face lit up under the ragged scarf. The machine hiccuped and a yellowed card dropped into the slot.
Motion to Suppress Page 2
