by Buffa, D. W.
But I was wrong; I would have to struggle with it, a struggle that would be much harder than anything I had imagined. Danielle was waiting for me late that Friday afternoon when I got back from court, the trial that had lasted weeks finally over.
“I seem to be in some trouble,” she said in a soft, silky voice that floated breathless in the air. She rose from the chair, a faint smile of nostalgia and regret on her lips. “I was hoping you could help.”
Though it scarcely seemed possible, she was even more beautiful than I remembered. I led her into my private office and watched, half-mesmerized, as she slid on the chair the other side of my desk and started taking off her gloves.
“If I had come here a week or so after that weekend on Blue Zephyr,” she asked as she pulled five slender fingers out of the second black glove, “what would you have done?- Perhaps invited me out to lunch?”
I felt too stupid, too confused, to talk. She seemed to enjoy it, how easily she had reduced me to utter incoherence. But there was more to it than the knowledge of the effect she had. For a brief moment, behind the laughter in her eyes, I thought I glimpsed the secret triumph of revenge. She tossed her head in what appeared to be defiance, not just at the memory of what she had felt as rejection, all those years ago, but at what was expected of a woman in her present, unfortunate, situation.
“Where do you think we would have gone?” she persisted in a mocking, teasing voice. “One of those busy places near the Ferry Building with a view – or a restaurant in some small hotel where we might have left before we ordered anything and taken a room?”
I was not sure what to say or even what to think. All I knew for certain – and if I had had any doubt about it before, I was sure about it now – was that I could not help her and she needed to find another lawyer. But then, before I could tell her, she shrugged her shoulders and with the quick, furtive glance, of someone who knows you share her secret, gave a rueful laugh.
“This is like one of those old movies, isn’t it? – The widow accused of murdering her wealthy husband, the window in the black dress, the dress that suggests a great many things, though mourning isn’t one of them, walks into the office of the only lawyer who might be able to save her and tries to seduce him into doing it.”
In her quiet, pleading glance, something of the young girl I had once known came back, and I could not just tell her to find someone else.
“I’m sorry about the trouble you’re in, Justine.”
Her large eyes brightened with what seemed almost gratitude.
“You remembered.”
“You changed, and it was a long time ago, at least a dozen years, and you were very young and I was nearly thirty, and….”
“And you were crazy about my sister and I was just a kid; and what I said to you, when you broke up, about marrying you – that must have seemed like some adolescent fantasy.” She waited until I smiled, admitting the truth of it, before she added, “But even then I knew what I wanted, and I wanted you.”
Something caught her eye, or perhaps she wanted to change the subject by the fact of distance. She got up from the wing back chair and went across to the window where her glance moved down the narrow, busy street to the Bay Bridge, to the hills on the other side and, beyond them, to a place she could not see, the place where when she was growing up no one seemed to notice her or pay her any attention.
“I always like San Francisco. I used to come out here, to get away from New York. Just for a few days, then I had to get back…. New York is like that, you know.” Her voice was distant, wistful, and full of mystery. She kept staring out the window at the bay shining silver bright in the summer light below. “You think you’ll go mad if you don’t get away from all the people, all the noise; and then, even if it’s only for a weekend in the Hamptons, you have to get back, afraid you might miss something if you don’t.” With an expression that suggested the vanity of things, she looked over her shoulder. “Or afraid that if you stay away too long, no one will miss you. But then, after I married Nelson, things changed, and we were always on the move, going wherever we felt the urge.”
She came back to the chair and sat down again. For a long time, she stared at me and did not say a word. The silence became complete.
“Will you help me?” she asked, finally.
“I better not.”
“But why?”
“You know why,” I said as gently as I could. Her eyes cast too great a spell, and I looked past her to the window. “I knew you when you were still…, I almost married your sister. I knew your mother,” I said as I brought my gaze back to hers. “I saw her just a few weeks ago.” There was no reaction, nothing, not the slightest interest. “I might have been able to represent Danielle; but you’re Justine.”
“No, I’m not,” she said quite seriously, as if I had made some kind of mistake. “That’s who I used to be; I’m not her anymore.”
“There are other lawyers, eager to take a case like this. I can give you names; I’ll even make the call.”
“I don’t want anyone else; I won’t have anyone else! You’re the only one who can help me. Don’t you understand? – You’re the only one I can trust. I’m in trouble, a lot of trouble, and if you don’t help me, no one can!” She was trembling so hard she could barely finish.
“I’m sorry,” she said, as she took a handkerchief from her purse and tried to dry her eyes. “I couldn’t trust anyone the way I trust you; I couldn’t tell them half the things they would want to know. You knew me when – that’s what you said – when I was just a kid, but I knew you, too; knew you better than you know. I saw what you were like, I saw how much it hurt when my foolish sister did what she did. I would have done anything for you then. I always believed in you, knew that, no matter what, you’d always do the right thing – I still believe in you. I know you’ll help me. You have to. It’s the only chance I have.”
The decision, like all the decisions that change our lives forever, had already been made, made somewhere deep inside where a voice insisted that only a coward refused a challenge, even when the danger was almost certain self-destruction.
“If I’m going to help you,” I told her after a long pause, “there can’t be any secrets. I have to know everything; you can’t hold back anything.”
She promised to tell me everything, swore she would be the best, most cooperative client I had ever had, and I believed her, not just because I had known her long before she became the famous face so many people thought they knew, but because she knew I meant it when I told her that the first time she lied to me would be the last, that even if we were in the middle of the trial she would never see me again. When she asked me what I wanted to know, I started at the beginning, or what I thought was the beginning. I asked her why she had married him. I did not doubt it was all about the money, but I wondered if there had been something more, if not love, then at least a feeling. Though the question could not have been simpler, it seemed to catch her off guard. Apparently, she had thought I was going to ask about the murder, of what had been called murder, her husband’s death. She had an answer for that; there would have been little else she would have thought about, coming to ask a lawyer to take her case, but she had not thought about this.
“Why did you marry him?” I asked again.
“I’ll tell you; I’ll tell you everything, though I wonder what you’ll think of me when you know. But I want you to know one thing first: marrying Nelson St. James was the worst mistake I ever made. I wish I’d never met him, I wish….” Shaking her head in despair, she bit her lip and looked away.
“Take your time,” I told her, watching the way she seemed to recoil from even the bare mention of her dead husband’s name. “Start at the beginning. Tell me how you first met him.”
Her head snapped up. She glared with what seemed anger, but, as soon became clear, it was directed, not at me, but at the memory of what had happened, of what, as it turned out, she had done to make it happen. That look of anger quickly
became one of derision.
“It was in an office, an office rather like this,” she said, with an expansive gesture of her hand. “It was larger, of course, much larger; but furnished in the same impeccable manner, the understated look of someone who knows the value of things. Whatever else Nelson did or did not know, he knew that.”
Resting an elbow on the arm of the chair, she draped her thumb and forefinger around her chin and gave me a look catlike in its luminous intensity.
“He wanted to see me,” she began, speaking slowly, making sure I understood the hidden meaning, the real truth, of each word. “Nelson St. James, the mysterious and always elusive Nelson St. James, wanted to see me.” Her eyes flashed, her chin came up a defiant half-inch. “I was not invited, I was summoned. He owned everything – half of New York - , more than that, I suppose. Nelson St. James wanted to see me, a young fashion model with ambition. Why wouldn’t I go?”
She bent forward, closer, a strange excitement coming over her as she began to tell me what had happened.
“He said he admired my work; he said he wanted to talk about my future. He said a lot of things about how my career would be managed and how famous I was about to become. I listened, I waited, I did not say a word; and then, when he was finished – after he had told me all the great things that were going to happen – I told him that was not the reason he had sent for me, and that he should have just told me at the beginning what he wanted. And then, before he could even think to say anything more, before he could start on that stale, practiced seduction he must have used on a thousand different women, I let him have me, right there in his office, an office just like this. When it was over, when he started to ask about the weekend and the places we could go, I laughed, and then I left. He started calling, of course….”
‘Of course’ - She pronounced that phrase without a shade of arrogance or conceit. Everyone wanted her, the woman she had become.
“I didn’t take his calls,” she continued; “and I wouldn’t call him back. I made him wait a week; then I called him and asked him not to call again. He started writing letters, sending flowers, apologizing for what had happened as if it had somehow happened without my consent!”
It seems ludicrous, bizarre, but I tried to make excuses.
“You had second thoughts; you realized what you had done had been a mistake?”
I could have been sixteen, a young boy - an innocent at heart - for the look she gave me.
“I did exactly what I had planned to do, and he did exactly what I had expected. Nelson had everything, all the money in the world, but he could not have me, not after that one time. He might have forgotten all about it, if I had said no at the beginning. I understood that, let him have me – part of me, anyway – and then I wouldn’t let him have me again. He thought that I had wanted him, that day in his office, and that I didn’t want him anymore.”
She searched my eyes, letting me know that she trusted me in a way that she had not trusted anyone before.
“It’s worse for a man, isn’t it – to have a woman once who doesn’t want you again – than not to have her at all? It makes you feel inadequate, undesirable, a little like what a woman feels when she’s been cast aside for someone younger and more exciting. It was a new experience for Nelson. He didn’t like it.”
Danielle lowered her eyes, a secret on her lips. Her long, slender legs were crossed and bent to the side. She held her hands in her lap, barely visible behind her knees.
“What happened then?” I asked, despite myself intrigued.
“The letters, the flowers – that finally stopped. I waited another week. Then I called and told him I had not returned any of his calls because I had been busy at work. We both knew it was a lie. That was the reason I told it.”
She waited to see if I understood, if I could fully appreciate the artful maneuver, the shrewd calculation, the way she had twisted everything to make it come out the way she wanted. It made me wonder about her estimate of me, what she thought my limitations might be. I had spent years examining the sometimes insidious means by which ingenious and unscrupulous people went after what they wanted, and she seemed unsure whether I could understand what she had told me without some further explanation.
“Because it was only if he knew, not just that it was a lie, but that you knew he would know it was a lie, that he would know you were interested, but only on terms of your own. Yes?”
“Yes, but can you guess the terms?” she asked as if this were some game she had now decided she wanted to play. “Will you be shocked to learn that having spent one short afternoon as the whore of every fantasy he had, I insisted on the same conditions that any proper virgin would impose?”
“Marriage?”
“If you want me – want me ever again – marry me! It was as simple as that. It was only complicated because it took him so long to understand it, to believe that I would never sleep with him again, never do much more than kiss him goodnight, until I became his wife, Mrs. Nelson St. James.”
Justine – Danielle – laughed at her own temerity, and then, commenting on her own performance, threw me a glance that suggested that it had not been any great achievement.
“Nelson did what everyone does when there is something they don’t have and think they need: he fell in love with me. Marriage became his idea. The thought of it made him happier than he had ever been. The night he asked me, he looked ten years younger. He took me to his favorite restaurant in Manhattan and gave me a diamond ring bigger, brighter, than anything I had ever seen. The whole evening was perfect. I said no.”
“You said no?”
“I didn’t want to get married.”
“But you just said…?”
“That he couldn’t have me again unless we were married. He made the same mistake you did: he assumed I wanted to marry him.”
She rose from the chair and stood next to the window, thinking back to what she had done and whether she was really prepared to keep her promise and, without holding anything back, tell me everything. She turned and looked at me, but still kept her silence. Her eyes seemed to widen and grow softer; a smile, strange and ambiguous, full of a meaning I could not yet fathom, moved slowly across her mouth.
“I told him that when I met the man I wanted to marry, I would know right away.”
She kept looking at me, reminding me that long before she had become Danielle, she had been Justine. And then, finally, she moved away from the window, but instead of coming back to her chair, she walked idly about the room, dragging her fingers on the furniture she passed as she glanced at the different pictures on the walls.
“That was cruel, to tell him that,” she said as she stopped in front of a photograph taken years earlier on my first day in court. “Cruel, but necessary; or so I thought before he showed me how seriously I had underestimated him.”
She spun on her heel and strolled back to the window. When she turned around and faced me, her eyes were all aglow.
“I thought he would be devastated. Does that shock you? - That I did it on purpose, that I was so determined to get what I wanted that I didn’t care what I did? Have you ever felt like that? – wanted something so much you didn’t care anything about the rules?”
“You wanted to marry him? You wanted to be Mrs. Nelson St. James?” I declared in a voice that surprised me by its harshness.
“Yes, Mrs. Nelson St. James. I didn’t want Nelson, I wanted what he had!” The eager defiance with which she said this seemed an incitement, a wish – no! a compulsion - to confess, to admit what she had done and why she had done it. “I said no because I thought he would ask again, and that he would want me even more when he did. I had not counted on his sense of self-respect, the sense he had of his own importance.” She paused just long enough to emit a slight, self-deprecating laugh. “The very reason I wanted to be married to him, and I didn’t understand what it meant!
“I said no, and do you know what he did? – He smiled and told me that he hoped that whe
n it happened – when I fell in love with someone the first time I saw him – that I would be as much in love as he was with me. He took me home, kissed me on the cheek, and left. A few days later, I read in the papers that he had gone to Europe on an extended vacation. It was the honeymoon trip he had planned for us. Two months later, he came back, engaged to some vaguely titled woman from a country and a court that no longer exists.”
I could not pretend to sympathize for a plan that had so obviously deserved to fail, but I was interested in what she had felt about it and, of even more importance for the purpose of grasping something essential about what kind of woman she had become, what she had done about it, how she had managed to make her plan finally work.
“And how did you feel?” I asked, staring at her in a way that let her know I would not settle for some vague, inconsequential response. “What did you do when you thought he was going to marry another woman?”
“I knew he wouldn’t marry her; he was only back a week before he took me out to dinner and asked me again.”
She had not felt anything, certainly neither jealousy nor doubt; nothing but a cold, almost brutal calculation. But then, as I remembered, however much St. James may have thought he was in love, he had also seen certain other advantages to a marriage with her.
“He talked about you, that weekend on the yacht, as if you were one of his possessions, something he owned. He told me there wasn’t any point being married to a beautiful woman unless you could show her off.”
“He married me because he wanted me,” insisted Danielle, thrusting out her chin. “But Nelson never wanted anything unless it was something everyone else wanted and could not have. Nelson was a bastard; I knew it, and I didn’t care. I made my bargain and I kept it. I made him three promises and I kept each one of them.”
There was something in the way she said it, something in the otherwise inscrutable look she gave me, that told me that what she was about to say would change everything, and that, however I remembered Justine, I would never be able to think about Danielle the same way again.
