Beaver At His Parents' [1]

by Norman Crane

  The clock on the dash flashes 12:23 p.m. in my face.

  “Fuck,” I yell.

  For a second, I seriously consider rolling up my pant legs and walking into the settlement conference room, but when that becomes apparently ridiculous I remember the spare suit in my office at Winterson’s. That’s closer than Rosie’s apartment where all my other clothes are. So with twenty-four tulips on the seat beside me, I drive.

  The world around me blears.

  I mix and match lanes like a madman.

  But only for a while. After that I start to feel progressively better, my control over everything seeping back. I loosen my grip on the steering wheel and ease up on the accelerator. I haven’t had an episode like this since high school. I hate losing control.

  I park with one wheel over the curb and race past Amanda’s surprised face and up the stairs leading to my shared office with Boris on the second floor of the Winterson’s building.

  I pass Winterson himself—

  He stops me with a firm grip of my shoulder, circles until he’s directly in front of me, scans me up and down and says, “Jesus, Charlie.”

  “Nerves,” I say.

  His firm grip turns into a fatherly one. “Been there myself.”

  He glances at his watch, which I interpret as my cue to leave, so I do, and burst into my own shared office glad to have escaped the attentions of everyone else. I lean my back against the door after closing it. That Boris is here, reclining in the ergonomic office chair behind his desk, doesn’t especially shock me. Giancarlo’s is just down the street. But he immediately stops talking, and it’s the person on the other side of the conversation whose presence knocks my compass needle askew. “Hello, Charlie,” Rosie says. She’s wearing her favourite grey skirt and white blouse. She looks hot. “I didn’t expect seeing you here.”

  I know there’s something off: about the situation, about her tone. But I don’t have time—

  “Did you vomit on yourself?”

  Comedy is my eternal shield and sometime tool of self-delusion. “I’ll have to ask Giancarlo about what he puts in those sandwiches.”

  The joke falls flat. No matter. I reach for the clean suit hanging on the divider between mine and Boris’ half of the office and start to strip out of my current one. “I hope you don’t mind the show.”

  “Leave it on your chair and I’ll drop it off to get dry cleaned,” Rosie says.

  “Why are you here?” I ask back.

  “One of my clients thinks he has a case against the city.”

  “He slipped on the stairs leading up to the police station last December and we may have proof that the company hired by the city to care for the property in the winter failed to do its job up to a reasonable standard,” Boris says.

  Rosie smiles sweetly. “I wasn’t going behind your back, Charlie. If that’s what you’re thinking. You and Boris can split the case if there’s anything to it.”

  I’m fully in my new suit now and therefore feeling less grimy, more traditionally polite. “Thanks for the dry cleaning offer,” I say to Rosie.

  “That’s what relationships are for. Sometimes you make a mess and sometimes you clean a mess up.”

  It’s a pragmatic view, I suppose. Rosie has always been a pragmatic person. I hope even pragmatic women enjoy receiving two dozen slightly damaged tulips for their birthdays. “Fill me in on Monday?” I ask Boris.

  “I can fill you in tonight,” Rosie says.

  She sounds seductive but the clock in the office keeps ticking and I have to bolt.

  Boris tosses me a travel bottle of mouth wash. “You’re welcome.”

  “Thanks,” I say.

  “You’ll still make it. Don’t speed. Don’t sweat. Listen to smooth jazz, do your box breathing and then walk in, set down your briefcase and convince them they’ve no choice but to sign on your terms and your time frame.”

  “Thanks, honey,” I say.

  And all the way down the stairs I worry that was either too possessive or too unprofessional.

  “I’m off,” I tell Amanda on my way out the door.

  I pray that my car starts and when it does I thank my grandparents for sending me a special Catholic prayer card to keep in the glove compartment. Maybe someone up there is looking out for me. Pope John Paul II observes me from the prayer card. Being Polish-Canadian might have its advantages after all.

  Driving, I keep one eye on the road and the other on the clock. The car’s tires seem to scrape the red illuminated minutes away. Whenever I get nervous, I take Rosie’s advice and slow my breathing, all the while remaining vigilantly positive: I won’t be late, I’ll make a good impression, I’ll get the signature I need that nets Winterson’s a vault of money. I’m aware that getting this done will make me valuable to the firm, but more than that I just want to win. Everything else is secondary. I pass a minivan from whose back window kids make faces at me. I want kids of my own even though all other kids annoy me. I inhale, hold for two seconds and exhale. I’m positive my kids will be quiet and tactful by virtue of genetics. The minivan becomes the past. As I feather the brake pedal, the light ahead of me turns from red to green and I glide through an intersection. Because my emotions are under my control now, time is also under my control. I will myself to be on time. Even at 12:55 p.m. I will it, and because some people are born to rule a world which others serve, I see the looming shape of my destination and know it could be no other way. Pulling into the parking lot is like fitting into a new suit: expected. I gargle with the mouth wash Boris gave me, step out of the car and spit. The few people in front of the hotel entrance—travellers, tourists, businessmen—are looking at me, but this time I’m not puking and they’re not staring. As I meet each of their gazes, they turn theirs down and away. They are frightened of me. They are in awe. I cross the asphalt to the tune of my clicking heels and pass under the roof that protects the hotel doors from rain, sleet and snow. The air is cooler here. I am cool. With my briefcase held firmly in my hand, I enter the building. One signature, I repeat silently to myself, is all I need. At the reception desk I ask for Conference Room C and the woman receptionist kindly points the way. Your colleagues are already waiting, she says. They’re not my colleagues. I’m readying myself, giving myself the pre-game speech I imagine the best coaches give the best hockey teams. I am Manifest Destiny, I scream at myself—quietly. There are only a few steps left separating me from my ambition. If Mrs. Johnson popped out from behind a corner, I wouldn’t recognise her. She is inconsequential. I reach Conference Room C’s double doors. They’re closed but from behind them I whiff the smell of money and make out the machine gun sound of self-absorbed laughter. I push the doors open, both of them because that’s the entrance I want to make. And as I instantly assess the geography of a room I’ve never seen, the faces turning toward me and falling quiet are familiar. They’re the weathered faces of businessmen and experienced corporate lawyers. It hardly matters. By walking in, I’ve already shut them up. I’ve soaked up their attention without saying one word. In the past hour, I’ve practised in my head nothing of what I will say. Saying is the domain of arguments, which are an expression of reason. This, all of us in the room know, is politics: is—definite article—law; and what are reason, justice or common sense in the face of the law but ex post justifications put forth by weasels and academics. Law, stripped of these pretensions, is little more than impressions, of which I, the centre of attention, am currently God. Fuck their experience. Fuck their precedents, factotums and standards of proof. Some time ago, I was on my knees unloading the contents of my stomach onto the tips of my shoes, but they don’t know that. They can’t see that. What they see is a mask of composure through whose brilliant eye holes glitter the consequences of misreading reality as a bluff. I open my mouth to speak.

  “We’ve agreed to settle,” one of the opposing lawyers says.

  And my mouth closes.

  “On the terms you laid out in our last series of email correspondence,” he a
dds.

  “It’s Friday,” says another, his forehead a mirror of sweat. “Let’s get out of here and enjoy the weekend.”

  I set my briefcase on one of the room’s long tables and extract several copies of the draft settlement agreement I typed out two weeks ago. I pretend not to be shocked, though in fact I am so shocked by this turn of events I may have peed myself a little. My boxers feel wet underneath my dress pants.

  I want to rush, to throw down the sheets of paper and snatch them back as quickly as possible, but I steel my nerves. The copies make the rounds methodically and each representative of the opposing party scrawls his signature. While this is not the document that officially ends the case, what follows will be mere formalities. Blue ink has locked out all other possibilities. And as the men add their successive scrawls, I watch their expressions and their body language, eager to identify the one detail that convinced them of the impossibility of their victory. I want to remember my winning play. My search, however, is fruitless. I’ll never know why they settled just as they’ll never know the weakness of my case. What to them seems inevitable I know to be otherwise. When the documents are all signed, I add my signature too. Then I pick up the pages, knock their edges against the table to make them straight and neat, and replace them in my briefcase. We shake hands, the victor with his row of vanquished foes, and because we are men civilised enough to know when to act with modesty, we immediately begin to chit-chat before, with smiling faces, retreating into the hotel lobby and outside to our parked cars, knowing that over the course of our careers we will all win and we will all lose and that our brotherhood relies not so much on the game we play as it does on the means by which we play it: other people’s lives and other people’s money.

  The way back to Winterson’s feels like a parade. I’m not bothered by the unending heat. I am sublime. My car sails on a river of the melted insignificance of lives that aren’t mine, which the summer boils into a gas that flows through my nostrils and fills the expanding cavity of my ballooning ego. The tulips beside me are wilting. I must be sucking out their vital juices. I make a note to water them only after remembering who they are for. How strange that they are not for me. I drive under the limit in the left-most lane without the intention of ever turning left, because I can. I only make way for an ambulance because its sirens slice through the density that is my arrogance. And then, all at once, I feel horrible again, like I did in the flower shop. The car behind me rejoins traffic but I stay pulled off to the side with my right blinker flashing. My body goes through the motions of vomiting without anything coming up. My throat is an empty conveyor belt. For an instant, I feel generally empty: a petrified body housing no mind, no emotion and no soul. Except the tulips still smell despite being baked inside the interior of a car—and the smell reminds me of Rosie, who is always reasonable. I can almost hear her voice telling me that my feeling of being devoid of emotion is itself an emotion, thereby making my entire fear irrational. But even in my head, she says nothing about my mind or soul.

  Rosie’s no longer at the office by the time I get back. I’m disappointed. I’ve already forgotten the strangeness of her being there earlier and I just want to see her again. I want to make her happy with flowers. That Boris also isn’t there, I’m glad. My desire to gloat is gone.

  Winterson’s office door is closed and I slip past on my way out without making a sound.

  Amanda smiles in reception from behind her desk and doesn’t ask how things went. She’s too wise to make that mistake. Her job is to keep track of where her lawyers are and to make sure we make our appointments. Results are beyond her domain. I wish Amanda a happy weekend. Her sons are going to be in town.

  I take the direct downtown route to Rosie’s building, avoiding rush hour because I ended work early, and ride alone in the elevator to our apartment to which I let myself in with the key she gifted me in December.

  Rosie’s not home yet, which isn’t unusual. She’s trying to earn her way into a more prestigious criminal law firm and you don’t do that by cutting corners on a Friday.

  Although I’m in a better state of mind than at almost any time today, I still don’t feel sufficiently at peace. I remember my feeling of elation after leaving the settlement conference and want that elation back. I’m a winner and I deserve to feel good. I don’t want to remember how I felt—how I still feel—about Mrs. Johnson.

  Spreading the curtains of the twelfth-storey window overlooking the city, I take this apartment for granted. I take the existence of both my nipples for granted. Mrs. Johnson has a nipple less than me and the odds are she’ll lose her house if she gambles on the outcome of her case. It’s a probability I want to forget. Ever since law school, I’ve had it drummed into my head that I need to learn to separate my clients’ lives from my own, but how does one do that? Comparisons are inevitable. Mrs. Johnson is poor and I am on my way to being wealthy. Once I pay off my student debt, I’ll remove my shackles and hand them to Mrs. Johnson, who’ll add them to the shackles she already wears. If she wins her case, I win. If she loses her case, I still win. Either way, I’ve done compensable legal work, but my ill feeling festers. Most people believe justice means matching a certain action with a sensible reaction: a transgression with a punishment. However, there’s a well known theory of justice which argues something different. According to this theory, justice has nothing to do with action and reaction and all to do with predictability and universal application. A society is just if all its members know the punishment for a crime and that punishment is equally applied to all transgressors. This is a democratic theory. A virus is also democratic. It wants to spread to everyone. If it’s a deadly virus, it will kill everyone. Maybe I’ve been watching too many zombie movies, but I don’t think a normal person would claim a virus is good simply because it predictably ends us all equally.

  “That’s hyperbolic,” Rosie tells me after I present the same metaphor to her during dinner. I still haven’t given her the tulips. They’re waiting in a jug of water in our apartment bathroom. “Moreover, there is no one fairness. Fair is always a subjective, not objective, valuation. Pretending otherwise can too easily serve as a shield for injustice.”

  She makes a valid point.

  “And, Charlie, you’re not in ethics class anymore. You don’t have to worry about this. Leave it up to the legislators. They work for you, and you work for your clients. Keep it simple or you’ll go insane.”

  “I’m sorry. I had a stressful day, I guess,” I say.

  “You don’t need to be sorry.”

  “It’s your birthday.” Rosie’s thirty-seven today. “I don’t want to ruin it with philosophising and pointless moaning.”

  “You already ruined the cranberry sauce,” she says—in jest, but it sounds mean anyway. Nevertheless, I like having a relationship solid enough not to have to rely on politeness and biting one’s tongue.

  “Can I be honest with you?” she asks.

  “You just were.”

  She ignores my sarcasm. “When I was first starting out, I did a lot of public defender work. The government would pay my airplane ticket north to a remote town and I would do my best to defend domestic abusers, gasoline sniffing thieves, prostitutes and the bluest-collar cheats you can imagine. It paid well but I considered it the garbage of legal work, a necessary gauntlet that all lawyers had to pass to join the club. I was sure it would get better, or at least cleaner, once I established myself. But the truth is it never gets better, only less pure and less direct. Today I deal with the same garbage. I successfully defend people who deserve to get punished. I fail to successfully defend some who don’t. I don’t fly as much and sometimes I have a junior do my leg work, but it’s otherwise identical. What has changed is my position vis-a-vis the constants. I don’t let the rot get to me and I don’t try to change the world. It makes me a better lawyer. I’m focussed, I’m sharp and I represent all my clients to the best of my abilities. When I lay down at night, I fall asleep without trouble. You sai
d you had a bad day…”

  “Stressful,” I correct her.

  “Thank you, counsel. A stressful day. What made it stressful? You attended a pre-trial, the judge preferred the opposition. You had a settlement conference, you won the conference. In between, you had to change clothes, you ate lunch and you went home early on a Friday.”

  I open my mouth to object but don’t know to what.

  “You’re still green as a lawyer, but what you did today is light. I say this with the greatest regard for you both as a person and a professional. If you can’t handle today being your every day, you might wish to consider an alternate career.”

  I bite my tongue. Maybe our relationship isn’t yet as solid as I’d like, or maybe I’m not used to talking shop with Rosie. Because I feel like a scolded child, I emphasise the petulance in my voice. “Pass the potatoes, please.”

  She passes me the dish and I take it. “Charlie, I’m serious.”

  “You’re seriously trying to convince me I’m not cut out to be a lawyer over a birthday dinner I made for you?”

  I can see her jaws grind against one another. She’s tense. I’m tense too. “First, the dinner is wonderful and thank you. Second, I’m not trying to convince you of anything. I’m giving you my honest advice. Third, you were the one who started whining. Unlike you, I forgot my workday at the fucking door.”