by Alon Preiss
“Who is he?”
“I won’t tell you. That’s an honest answer. I’m sorry.”
“How long have you been seeing him?”
“Since before I met you.”
“So in a way – ”
“I’m not cheating on you,” she said. “I’m cheating on him.”
“I suppose.” He turned away from her.
“It’s been going on a long time,” she said, without emotion. “It’s one of those things that intelligent women don’t get involved with.” She tugged on his sleeve. She cared tremendously for Charlie, she said. She really did. Trying to make Charlie feel better, she broached an unspoken subject: She felt so strongly for Charlie, she had such undeniably genuine feelings of deep affection for him that it was not impossible, she noted rashly, that she might even perhaps marry him someday.
“If you were to marry me, would you give up this other man?” Charlie asked.
“Never,” Joyce replied. Then, after a few moments: “Are you going to break up with me?”
“No,” Charlie said, and the answer did not sound like a reaffirmation of his love for her, but, instead, like an acknowledgement of defeat.
In the middle of her testimony before the subcommittee, Joyce suddenly stopped speaking. A senator from South Carolina had asked a particularly inane question about some matter of alleged concern that demonstrated both his lack of knowledge of her area of expertise and Joyce’s absolute ability to run roughshod over any of these uneducated yahoos – yet, for a number of seconds, no answer came to her. She knew how she felt about the issue of taxes on the oil and gas industry, but for some reason the specific question left her speechless. She knew who was right and who was wrong, and her strong interest in seeing any such taxes defeated was obvious. Yet still she sat before the junta of senators, unable to make her case, powerless to bring about the ends she desired. And for that brief moment before her faculties returned to her, blessing her with a witty and politely acerbic response … for that one brief moment, she understood Charlie’s life, and how he must have felt standing beside her on that glowing dock that stretched off infinitely. It was a cold and demeaning place to be.
That night, Daniel and Susan stood on his balcony, arms about each other, each with a wine glass in hand, watching fireworks shoot off the boats on the East River and explode into the black New York sky. Below them on the street, crowds of people jostled each other for a better view, and bellowed their approval as red white and blue flames crashed to earth.
“What are you thinking?” Daniel asked Susan.
Susan, staring at the sky, said, “About a dream I had when I was a little girl.”
The next morning, Daniel awoke at six, his limbs wrapped around Susan’s, his hand pressed firmly against her bare thigh, listened for fifteen seconds to a radio news report, took a five minute shower, brushed his teeth, dragged a comb through his short lawyer-hair, put on his suit, tied his tie, inspected his shoes and frowned at a particularly noticeable scuff. Before he left he kissed Susan goodbye, and she smiled in her sleep, and he kissed her again. And when Susan woke up, she thought she saw a body lying beside her, she thought she saw a smiling face welcoming her into the day, even thought she felt Daniel’s breath on her cheek. But when she rolled over to say good morning to Daniel, she found him missing, wondered how he could have left the apartment without even wishing her well. This brought on a sour mood that would persist for the remainder of the day. Before getting out of bed, she telephoned Daniel’s office, listened to his voice mail greeting, whispered, “Daniel, you didn’t say a proper goodbye this morning. I’m feeling neglected,” and she hung up the phone.
She walked out onto the balcony wrapped in Daniel’s oversized robe, and she looked out over the water. Whenever Daniel was absent, Susan would think of questions to ask him. He had never mentioned his parents, for example. He had never mentioned what he had done with his life before he’d become a lawyer. That was an undocumented gap of several years. And he had explained only briefly why he and his wife had split up – it was no one’s fault, and so on – but he had never told her who had left whom, and he had never mentioned his wife’s name. This woman I’m married to – that was the way he still described her, evasively, but without bitterness or irony. Susan felt that to dig deeper was almost impolite; they hadn’t known each other for very long, although they’d slept together and proclaimed true love for one another. Susan fully believed her own proclamations, and Daniel’s, but she had no idea why.
She wondered suddenly where Daniel’s pictures of his wife were hidden. Carefully, Susan looked through Daniel’s bureau drawers, then padded into his den. At the very bottom of the lowest drawer on the left side of his desk, Susan found an envelope with ten wedding photographs. Why exactly ten? she wondered. She was startled at his wife’s beauty, and her youth, and the happiness in her eyes as she stood in her proud wedding dress; but in the last picture Susan examined, in which Daniel was poised to cut the wedding cake, she could see a look of hesitation, or of worry, on his face. Ahah, Susan thought. So there. He realizes his mistake.
She carefully put the photographs back into the envelope, then back into the bottom of his desk drawer, and she went on with her day.
Later that morning, a comfortable and overpriced car service ferried Daniel to the Environmental Protection Agency’s dingy Office of Regional Counsel, where he was scheduled to meet in a large conference room with the attorneys for other potentially responsible parties (as the term was known), all tapped by the EPA to clean up the mess in New Jersey. The EPA representative in attendance was a smug, heavy-set woman in her mid-forties named Rhonda Cantor, who grimly thanked all the polluters for their appearance. To Daniel’s amusement, each attorney stood up and proposed a cleanup schedule. Ms. Cantor would nod or grimace, and take notes. When she called Daniel’s name, he stood and explained that his client intended to disregard completely its alleged responsibilities. She seemed startled, speechless. “Thank you,” he said, slid his briefcase off the conference table and marched out of the room.
Five minutes after he returned to the office, Ms. Cantor telephoned him. “Wait a minute,” he said, “I’ve got to get off the other line.” He put her on hold for two full minutes while he stared at his fingers. Then he picked up the phone. They engaged in a moment of pleasantries. Then she got down to business: “It’s not in your client’s interest to ignore this entirely, Daniel. May I call you Daniel?”
“Sure. I’m not ignoring it,” he replied. “I turned up at your office as requested. I explained that my client is not responsible for the mess, and that Edward Bear won’t engage in the cleanup. First of all, I don’t think you’ve got any evidence to show that the waste from the Edward Bear plant was ever shipped to the site in question. I just don’t think that the records exist. The shippers were affiliated with Plastic People, a company defunct for decades. Secondly, the waste belonged to Plastic People, not to Edward Bear.”
“Edward Bear was the generator, and it has generator liability. Don’t play these games. You must know that your function is to negotiate and settle. If you won’t cooperate now, I’ll issue a unilateral administrative order demanding your participation.”
“Look, a UAO won’t make Edward Bear any more responsible than it is without the UAO. Go ahead, if you want.” He shut his eyes.
“Your client will be responsible for daily penalties and treble damages.”
“Thanks, I’ve read CERCLA,” Daniel said, “but my client will be responsible for nothing, nothing at all. Because it’s not my client’s fault.”
“I didn’t really expect to deal with a mid-level on this,” she said, trying a new tack. “I think you’ve seen too many movies. Who’s the partner on this matter?”
“Rhonda, don’t try to steamroll me,” he said sharply. “I’m handling this matter.”
Maybe, years ago, Johnson & Tierney had refused to interview the young Rhonda Cantor; maybe she’d sent her resume to all the top law
firms and been soundly, roundly rejected. Unable to work for big business, and turned down by the Securities & Exchange Commission, she might have finally found employment with the EPA, doomed to spend her life fighting with well-paid, nicely dressed big firm attorneys. Maybe envy explained her unwaveringly ill-humored demeanor. He’d figured her out, Daniel decided.
“I make the decisions, and you will talk only to me.” He stopped, caught his breath. “And, by the way, I haven’t seen a movie in years.”
“Everyone else will settle,” she said. “Every other PRP will settle.” Daniel’s other line lit up, and his pulsed quickened.
“Maybe every other PRP’s guilty,” Daniel said, consciously adding a little shrug to his voice. “That’s not my concern.”
There was an uncomfortable silence.
“Then there’s nothing else to add.”
“No.”
“I won’t take up any more of your time.” And she hung up without another word.
Friday night, Daniel and Susan sat together in the West End bar on Broadway, talking about children, about what children they would like to have (not necessarily with each other but, Daniel assumed, that was the hidden subtext), about what names each of them preferred, about what sort of spirituality might be necessary to impart to them. He and Natalie had agreed not to have children. Did he want them now? Did he want Susan to bear his children? Not at all; but he wanted Susan to be happy.
It was exactly three months after they had first declared their love for one another. Daniel was smoking, and Susan was holding a lit cigarette between two fingers and taking a puff every once in a while, not inhaling, just looking strangely innocent and beautiful with a cigarette in her left hand, not really smoking, and talking about God.
“I'll tell my kids it’s up to them,” Daniel said, “that I know for a fact there’s nothing out there, but if it helps them sleep, what the hell,” to which Susan replied, “I’d like them to think there’s a reason for them to be here, and some cause for hope.” Hope for what? Daniel wondered, but before he could ask, a fat man began screaming hysterically at the bartender, desperate accusations, profane characterizations. Daniel and Susan both laughed and forgot all about the spiritual world and ordered a few more drinks. In her apartment, just before her eyes drooped shut, Susan asked Daniel, “Why do you love me?” and he said, “I don’t know,” which was the only correct answer, Daniel supposed. Susan seemed to agree.
The next morning, he woke breathing Susan’s breath, tucked in her smiling embrace, filled with apprehension. His head was throbbing – the alcohol, of course, nothing more than that. Still, he felt dangerously removed from the delirious happiness that now filled his life, as though he were a sad and lonely ghost floating like an aura around a genuinely blissful man, longing to possess him, to feel his joy and to understand why the man so deeply loved the young woman who shared his bed. Could it have been any young woman? Could it have been Natalie, years ago? Keeping a careful distance so as not to awaken Susan, he whispered, “I don’t want you to waste your time on me.”
That morning, they ate bagels with lox and drank coffee at Susan’s little kitchen table, the sun streaming in through half-open blinds. They were both in their robes, and Susan’s hung open loosely. Invitingly? Susan caught his gaze. Did he like what he saw? she asked. This morning, the intimacy of Susan’s affectionate remark provoked in Daniel nothing more than a strained smile, which she returned.
“Something’s wrong,” she said.
He asked why she thought so.
She said something just seemed wrong, that was all
Maybe, Daniel said, the previous night’s conversation – about children and the like – had made Susan feel uneasy. She shook her head and asked if it had made Daniel uneasy.
“No,” he said.
“I thought nothing of it,” Susan said. “Really, Daniel. Nothing.”
“All right. Okay, then. Good.”
“Don’t start feeling trapped and threatened.” She reached out and touched his hand, and she tried to smile. “Okay?”
Okay, he agreed. He promised to feel neither trapped nor threatened, and he held her hand at her little table in her eat-in kitchen, in his big fuzzy terrycloth bathrobe.
The following Saturday evening, while standing on a street corner in Tribeca waiting for Susan, he saw his wife and a young man getting out of a cab. She stumbled a little, her lover caught her, and they both burst into laughter. The darkness might have played tricks on Daniel. It might have been true that the young man was as handsome as a movie star, with perfect, unworn features that might have been sculpted by Natalie herself in the middle of a beautiful dream. It might have been Daniel’s imagination that Natalie smiled at him with adoration in her eyes: Thank you for catching me, I adore you! It didn’t matter.
Susan grabbed him from behind, laughing when he jumped. “You frightened me,” he said softly. That was the point, she told him. He looked past her, at the corner where Natalie had smiled at the handsome young man with such affection. “What are you looking at?” she asked him, and he could have told her that he’d just seen his wife staring at another man with unseemly passion, but, instead, in a crowded restaurant surrounded by happy faces laughing as pasta hung sloppily from their mouths, he drank three martinis before dinner and began kidding Susan mercilessly, mimicking all the things that, years later, he would remember with such affection: her uncontained laughter, how she held her hand to her mouth when astonished, the way she would blurt out multi-syllabic thesaurus terms to describe the simplest situations, or preface every blunt or significant statement with a few sheepish remarks explaining why she was about to make a blunt or significant statement.
Halfway through appetizers, Susan shook her head. “This is going to be one of those embarrassing things, Daniel,” she said. “And I’m sorry. But I’m leaving now, without you. I’m leaving this restaurant because I don’t think you really want me to stay.” She stood up, looking away from him. “This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t call me tomorrow and explain everything.” She put one hand on the table, staring past the diners at the crowds waiting on the sidewalk, eager for a table. More softly, almost a whisper: “I want you to call me tomorrow and explain everything.” Then her coat was on and, umbrella in hand, she maneuvered her way through a room thick with laughter and joy. Through the restaurant’s broad windows, Daniel saw her out on the sidewalk, striding briskly, staring at her feet.
He complained about his predicament to Henry, who subsequently introduced him to his sister, Sandra, a funny young woman whose dark features were filled with character. Daniel took her to see Les Miserables, then they went back to his apartment and soon found themselves rolling about nakedly, laughing joylessly, screaming and gasping with something approaching terror. “I’m sorry,” he said, afterwards. “I mean …” She told him he shouldn’t apologize; it was bad form to apologize. The sex was perfectly good, after all. “Yes,” he said, and he held himself back from apologizing again. He was in a panic for a week, and he would not return Susan’s calls. He got an HIV test done, which turned out to be negative, but then he learned that the virus doesn’t appear on the test for months. He didn’t know why he thought Henry’s sister had AIDS, he just did. He grew extremely tired. He agreed to see Susan, even agreed to sleep with her, but he was impotent. She told him that she’d heard that happened to many men in their late thirties. Then she apologized. Subconsciously, she said, maybe she’d wanted to insult him, and she was very sorry. He became angry, and he flipped over on one side and would not speak to her. He fell asleep, then left in the morning before she woke up. The following Sunday, Henry and Rachel dropped by his apartment on their way to brunch. He was sitting in his living room on the couch, chain-smoking and watching politicians on television argue and argue. They tried to convince him to join them for a day in the park, but he declined. Henry ran out to get some coffee.
“I asked him to leave,” Rachel said. “I wanted to tell you that Susan r
eally loves you, and that you should treat her better. Honestly,” she said, “I believe in Fate.” Daniel kissed Rachel, and she kissed him back, and they hugged and kissed on the couch. Why did that happen? Rachel admitted that this was the sort of thing that would have happened on television at that particular moment which was why she let him kiss her and why she even allowed herself to kiss him back, but it was only afterwards that Rachel realized ruefully that it never would have happened in real life. Memo to self, she noted ruefully. Do real life things from now on, not TV things. Henry rang the doorbell, Daniel let him into the apartment and they all drank coffee together and laughed at Henry’s funny jokes. After they left, he visited his next-door neighbor, a woman in her forties whose husband had recently died. Thank you for coming by, she said. I’ve been so lonely. They crashed together to the floor, and afterwards she cried. I should be more faithful to his memory, she said, and she cried some more. Daniel went back to his apartment and drank vodka until he passed out.
The next day, Daniel stumbled in to work, his eyes barely focusing. In the hallway, he nodded to Henry, thanked him almost incoherently for the gourmet coffee he’d brought over on Sunday and apologized for his refusal to join the two of them for brunch. Henry said he didn’t really care, and, frowning, explained that he felt out of sorts that morning, that there was something wrong that he couldn’t identify, and that Daniel should forgive him for his abruptness and rudeness. “I’m going to the gym,” Henry added. “Maybe I can work it out of my system.”
Rest, Daniel suggested instead. Go home and sleep it off. But Henry shook his head. Daniel’s friend then headed out of the building and across the street to the high-priced health club frequented by many of the firm’s attorneys, where fifteen minutes later he was injured in a strange leg press accident that left his left thigh badly bruised. The accident involved the type of leg press in which air pressure is substituted for genuine weights; the accident, therefore, was somewhat analogous to being injured in a typhoon.
