The Last Good Day

by Peter Blauner

  “Never mind.” Gwen Florio turned her back to the witness stand and the dais. “I think I already know the answer.”

  “Ms. Florio, do you have any other questions?” The mayor massaged his temples.

  “I’m almost done, Your Honor.”

  “Please be brief.”

  She wheeled on Lynn with a refreshed smile. “Mrs. Schulman, isn’t it true that until recently your husband was vice president of legal affairs at a new company called Retrogenesis?”

  Caught off-guard by the sudden change of pace, Lynn needed a second to answer. “Yes, he is. I mean, he was.”

  “Isn’t it true that there was a short article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday about that company having to declare bankruptcy?”

  “I guess so.”

  Obviously, Gwen Florio had done her homework on the Internet. A corner of Barry’s mouth twitched.

  “So wouldn’t it be fair to say that your family has been going through quite a few emotional stresses and financial strains lately?”

  “We’re doing okay,” Lynn said stiffly, in a voice that sounded unconvincing even to her own ears.

  “But clearly you’re having a bit of a shortfall, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t know anybody who isn’t …”

  “But you have a substantial mortgage on your house and a child who’s going to college next year, don’t you?”

  Lynn blanched as if the contents of her garbage cans had just been emptied onto her lap. “We’ll be fine.” She stared at Jack Davis, waiting for him to object.

  “But until your husband finds another job you don’t have any money coming in. Isn’t that right? You’re surviving on your savings, aren’t you?”

  Barry shook his head, knowing that there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about this.

  “Yes,” Lynn admitted. “Yes, we are.”

  “So isn’t it true that this entire hearing is a pretext for you and your husband to set up a civil suit against the Riverside Police Department for harassment and drain the town coffers because his business failed?”

  Florio cast a sly tongue-in-cheek look at the board members, making sure that they understood that their interests were at stake as well.

  “No, that’s not true,” Lynn raised her voice. “That has nothing to do with why I’m here.”

  The mayor banged the gavel wearily. “All right, Ms. Florio. That’s enough. Do you have any other relevant questions?”

  “No, Your Honor,” the attorney said. “I do not.”

  For a few seconds, there were no more muttered asides, no coughing, no whispers. Just the uncomfortable squeak of people fidgeting in wooden pews as air leaked out of this case.

  “Then, thank you, Mrs. Schulman.” The mayor gave Lynn a terse nod without quite looking at her. “You may step down.”

  49

  “WELL, THAT WAS fucking great.” Barry slammed the driver’s side door of the Saab and started the engine. “Is there anything else you might’ve forgotten to mention to me, like having syphilis or a half a million dollars in gambling debts?”

  “Barry, I’m sorry. I tried to tell you before, but …”

  They were in the parking lot behind Town Hall, watching the court buffs stream out the back of the building as the dusk fell over town and the sky turned the color of a raw bruise.

  “Did you seriously think all of this wasn’t going to come out?” He shook his head, barely able to look at her. “Did you really believe that you could get up and lie in court, the way you lied to me in our home? Are you crazy?”

  “Can we go pick up the kids? It’s getting dark, and people are leering at us.”

  Jeanine and her other friends rubbernecked as they walked to their own cars.

  “Fine. Let them. See if I care. They can charge admission far as I’m concerned. Because I’ve gotta be the biggest sucker in the tristate.”

  A burly photographer with hair like a swatch of brown shag rug glued to his scalp and a green laminated press pass dangling from his neck stepped in front of the car and started shooting them through the windshield.

  “Oh, terrific.” Barry stepped on the gas and gave him the finger. “Where the hell did he come from? So was there a reporter in the courtroom as well?”

  The car lurched forward, and the photographer jumped out of the way. Local stringer, Barry told himself. The major metropolitan dailies were probably still too busy covering 9/11 to send anybody up here to cover a measly disciplinary hearing. On the other hand, maybe having a story in the regional paper would be worse because more space would be devoted to it. From the corner of his eye, he saw Lynn fish a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses out of her bag.

  “You must really think you’re something,” he said, steering the car toward the lot’s exit. “You fooled around with both of these guys and never told me about it?”

  “We’re talking about something that happened twenty-five years ago. Are you proud of everything you did when you were seventeen?”

  He hesitated a moment, not quite able to rid himself of the memory of tipping Richie about the raid at Dr. Feelgood’s. And that was when he was almost thirty.

  “Well, what happened anyway?” he said, finding himself in a bottleneck behind at least a dozen other cars trying to get out of the lot. “How long did you manage to keep this little juggling act going with the brothers?”

  “It wasn’t a juggling act,” she said fiercely, putting on the shades. “It only happened once. Okay? Once. And I’ve been sorry about it the rest of my life.”

  “I feel sick.”

  “Do you want to hear what happened, or do you want to keep berating me?”

  “I’d like to hear the truth. That’s what I’d like.”

  “It was senior year. I was burned out. I’d just had the abortion. The whole world was falling in on me.”

  “That’s a convenient excuse, isn’t it?”

  “I’m not making an excuse,” she said. “I’m telling you how it happened. I didn’t know someday this was all going to come out in open court.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “So Mike was all over me all the time because I got rid of ‘his baby.’ He had this whole idea that we were going to get married. And at first it seemed okay because my mother had been so sick and I didn’t know what else to do. And then she got better, and I realized that it was going to be this nightmare. That he’d never let me be out of his sight. And then after I had the abortion, forget about it. It was like dating the Taliban. No taking pictures, no short skirts, no going out on my own.”

  “Why didn’t you just break up with him?”

  “I tried, but he wouldn’t let me alone. We were in the same school, so he could follow me everywhere. Or I’d wake up in the middle of the night and see him standing under my window, looking up at me from the lawn. Or he’d see me talking to another guy at a party, and he’d start smacking the guy around, looking for a fight. And then he hit me. It really started to get crazy.”

  “So, what’d his brother have to do with any of this?”

  “Johnny tried to get in between us, kind of like a human shield. He kept telling Mike to leave me alone and get a grip. He was my bodyguard. And then after a while, I started feeling like I was closer to him than I was to Mike.”

  “Yeah, how did that work?”

  “He used to come by the house sometimes to talk after his shift volunteering at the firehouse. Or we’d go out for a ride just to let some steam off. I really liked talking to him. Everyone else thought he was just this maniac, but he had this whole other sensitive side too. He loved his family and all that, but he also saw that they were strangling him. He had this Bruce Springsteen eight-track he used to play over and over in the car, the one with the song that says the door’s open but the ride isn’t free. And that’s what he always used to say to me. That I had to get out, no matter what it cost in the long run.”

  “And so that’s why you fucked him?”

  “I didn’t fuck him.”

 
“All right. You blew him. Whatever. I don’t need to hear all the grisly details.”

  “I don’t know why it happened.” Her face started to buckle behind her shades. “I guess those rides home just kept taking more and more detours. Sometimes, we’d go park by the river and get high and just talk. It was very …” She sagged, despairing of making him understand. “He was just this really strong guy, but you knew he wouldn’t be around for very long …”

  “Oh, so that’s why you fucked him.”

  “I didn’t—I … forget it. I’m not saying I’m glad that’s what happened.” She gathered herself up, refusing to be shamed any further. “I’m just telling you.”

  “Yeah, but you were going out with his brother. Didn’t you think about what that was going to do to the two of them? Hadn’t you ever heard of the word consequences?”

  “I was an idiot, Barry. Okay? Are you happy? I was a complete fucking idiot. Or do you need me to say I was a little slut too?”

  He quietly seethed, watching the mayor climb into the front of a navy Buick over on the right with an accordion-size court file under his arm and a look of strained exhaustion. In one part of his mind, Barry knew that he should be cool and rational. His wife was telling him about an indiscretion committed in another century, literally. But the middle of his brain remained stubbornly Neanderthal, not accepting that a woman of his could be so reckless.

  “So why did you do it?” he said, tensing his shoulders and squeezing the vinyl-covered wheel.

  “I don’t know.” She looked away in self-disgust. “Boredom. Stupidity. Maybe I just wanted to show Mikey he couldn’t tell me what to do. Or maybe I was just trying to close that door behind me.”

  “Say what?”

  “I’m saying, maybe once I made this big decision to get out of town, I had to make sure I couldn’t come back too easily. So I had to slam the door behind me. I know that’s what Johnny wanted to do. And then Mike and him had this terrible knockdown drag-out fight. I don’t even know how Mike found out in the first place. But then they never spoke again. Johnny got killed.”

  “What happened?”

  “I guess he was telling another idiot not to hit his girlfriend, and the guy pulled a gun on him.” She shook her head. “I couldn’t believe that when I heard it. He was this guy trying to break the chain, and it killed him. It literally killed him.”

  The tall red-eared court officer eased in front of them, driving a Chevy with bumper stickers that said “ABORTION KILLS” and “AN ARMED SOCIETY IS A POLITE SOCIETY.”

  “Shit.” Barry pumped his foot up and down on the brake. “And you never had the decency to tell me about any of this? Didn’t I ask you to level with me? Didn’t I ask you to tell me what was going on so I wouldn’t make a complete ass of myself?”

  “I’m so sorry. I never thought I’d have to get back into all this again.”

  “Well, that’s about the millionth thing you were wrong about, isn’t it?” He hit the wheel in frustration, accidentally sounding the horn. “Along with thinking you could just come strolling back into this town …”

  “I didn’t know. I thought people would forget …”

  “Well, obviously not everyone has as selective a memory. Seriously—what were you thinking? That they were just going to automatically forgive you because you’re all grown-up now?”

  “Maybe,” she murmured, a single tear rolling out from under her Ray-Bans.

  “Stop it,” he said.

  “I can’t help it.”

  “Yes, you can.” He rolled forward after the “ABORTION KILLS” car, heading for the guardhouse by the gate, where his ID had been checked earlier. “You know, it really doesn’t bother me that you slept with this guy and his brother. Or at least I know it shouldn’t bother me. What bothers me is that you lied to my face about it. You lay in bed next to me, looked me right in the eye, and lied your ass off when I asked you a straightforward question. You lied to me in the house I bought for you. Under the roof I paid to have re-done in slate. And you know what? It turns my stomach. How can I ever believe anything you say again?”

  “Oh shut up, Barry.”

  “What?”

  “I said, shut the fuck up.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You heard me. You’ve got a lot of nerve, talking to me about lies. When were you going to tell me about the stock falling and the company collapsing?”

  “That’s not the same thing.” He stepped on the brake and pushed against the back of his seat.

  “Like hell it isn’t. We had most of our life savings tied up in that company. And most of the kids’ college tuition. We sat at the kitchen table after we went to Windows on the World and we talked about our future. This was supposed to be a decision we made together with our eyes wide open. How long were you going to wait to tell me it was all going down the toilet?”

  “That’s different. I was trying to protect you from worrying about it.”

  “Bullshit. You were trying to protect yourself. God forbid anybody should ever think Barry Schulman was ever a failure at anything.”

  “Hey!”

  “It’s just win, win, win all the time with you. No wonder Clay has so much trouble talking to you …”

  “Fuck you,” he said.

  “Fuck me? Fuck me?” Her voice broke. “How dare you. How dare you talk to your wife that way.”

  “You accuse me of letting our family down. What else do you want me to say?”

  “How about, ‘We’ve both made mistakes …’”

  “Oh, how wonderfully feminine and compassionate. Well, screw that. Your lying has got us in this courtroom and the shit we’re up to our necks in now.”

  “And your lying has me worrying about how we’re going to make our next mortgage payment. I saw the last statement from Citibank …”

  “Who asked you to open my mail?”

  “And who asked you to put a joint account in your name alone?” she said. “I put money into that account too.”

  “Yeah, about three thousand dollars in the last three years.”

  “That was a low blow.” She turned away from him. “You know I’m just getting my work going again.”

  “And who’s been paying the bills in the meantime? Huh? The Ford Foundation? The National Endowment for the Arts? The United Way? No, it was me. Me. Barry Schulman, the failure. From Clifton Avenue in Newark and Barringer High School. You know what I’d like to hear for once? Not just oh, Barry, you don’t spend enough time with the kids. Not oh, Barry, you never make time for us. Not oh, Barry, you don’t know what goes on at this house and all the work I do to keep things running when you’re not around. You know what I’d like to hear just for once? Hurray. Good for you, Barry. You done good. Hurray for you, Barry. You did right by your family. Maybe you’re not such a schmuck after all.”

  “I tell you that all the time.”

  “No, you don’t. You make me live my whole life like I’m in debt.”

  “Well, you know what I think?” Lynn rounded on him, ready to defend herself. “I think that lawyer was right about one thing today. And I think she hit it right dead-center bull’s-eye. This is a marriage that’s in trouble. And I didn’t see how serious it was until right now.”

  “Well, wake up and smell the coffee, baby. You’re the one who left the fucking stove on!”

  He stopped, realizing not only that they had been shouting, but that Michael Fallon and his lawyer, Gwen Florio, were standing just a few feet away from the car, staring at them through the streaky windows like newlyweds swearing they’d never end up this way.

  “Oh, shit.” Lynn blanched behind her sunglasses.

  Barry honked his horn. “Come on already!”

  “You think they could’ve heard us?”

  “Must’ve made their day if they did.”

  “Do you think maybe we could put the swords down for a minute?”

  “Yeah,” Barry grumbled. “Maybe that would be a good idea.”

  The c
ars in front of him moved, and he cruised by Fallon slowly, keeping his eyes locked on the cop, letting him know that he had a bead on him.

  “So, what do you want to do?” asked Lynn, sounding sober and subdued. “Do you want to continue this fight later?”

  “I’m not sure what the point would be.”

  “It sounds like we’ve both been saving up ammunition for a while.”

  “Yeah, but this isn’t the time to use it.” He tried to relax his shoulders. “You turn on each other in the middle of a trial and you’re dead.”

  He watched Gwen Florio rise up like a Degas ballerina on tiptoe to whisper something in Fallon’s ear as she pointed at their passing car.

  “So, what really happened that day anyway?” he said, taking a deep breath.

  “Which day?”

  “The day you were testifying about. The day he came into your studio and tried to kiss you.”

  “What are you asking me? It happened the way I said it did.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Yesterday I was lying, today I’m telling the truth.”

  “Today I am telling the truth. Jesus!” She balled up her fists. “I thought we were trying to de-escalate.”

  “Listen,” he said, struggling to sound calm and judicious, “we’re just talking like adults here, okay? Whatever the truth is, I’m going to have to find a way to live with it. But I need to know. I need the correct information to know what I’m supposed to do next.”

  “What is it that you’re planning to do?”

  “I just need you to give it to me straight, because it’s not too late to say we’ve made a mistake.”

  “Barry, look at me.”

  She took off her Ray-Bans and stared at him. Her eyes were red and still brimming. The last time he’d seen her so completely cored was after she’d squeezed Clay out of her body and he tenderly laid the baby on her heaving chest. He sensed that this was another place where their marriage would either break or bend into a new shape.

  “I was wrong not to tell you everything about Johnny the first time,” she said. “I thought I could get away with it because I’m not the same person I was then. But you have to know that I’ve never been unfaithful to you. Not even for one day. I’m not saying I’ve never thought about other men, any more than you can honestly say you’ve never thought of other women …”