Secret Lives of Second Wives

by Catherine Todd

  28

  American optimism, in the end, proved no match for Russian fatalism.

  When I got through to an officer at the INS (no mean feat), I was told that Alexei’s petition had been “held up” at the special request of the State Department.

  “He got a denial,” I pointed out. “Not even a Notice of Action.”

  “I couldn’t really comment on that,” he said.

  “Do you know the reason given for the holdup?” I asked.

  “I couldn’t really comment on that.”

  Translation: no.

  “Well, do you know if they ran a security check?”

  “I couldn’t—well, actually, at this point, our computer system isn’t yet compatible with the Interagency Border Inspection System.”

  Translation: no.

  “But we expect to remedy that soon,” he added brightly.

  “Well, could it be that the denial is a mistake, and what’s really intended is a hold until they cross-check him with the computer system?”

  “That’s possible, but I really can’t say,” he said. “Do you have any reason to believe your client is a security risk?” he asked.

  “Of course not,” I said.

  “WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO NOW?” Brooke asked me.

  I put the heels of my hands to my forehead and massaged my temples. It didn’t help. “Christ, I’m not sure,” I said. “The INS is so frustrating.” It was a measure of how much things had changed that I would make a confession of uncertainty to Brooke. I didn’t think she’d hesitate to use it against me, but I just didn’t care anymore.

  “Are you going to appeal?”

  “Probably,” I said. “But it’s hard to build a case for appeal when I don’t know what the grounds for denial were. If they even meant to deny him. You certainly couldn’t tell from talking to the INS officer.”

  “Um … you probably wouldn’t want to do this, but …”

  “What?” I said. “I’m open to suggestions.”

  “I think you should …” She frowned. “I mean, it’s just an idea, but …”

  I resisted the impulse to grab her by the shoulders and shake her. Clearly if she didn’t find another job soon, I was going to have to find her one. It was so ironic that of all the people in Grady & Bartlett, she was the one who was still around. She was my curse, my albatross, my punishment, my … I gritted my teeth. “I’m listening, Brooke.”

  She made a little fluttery motion with her hands. “I was just thinking that you might want to consult Harrison.”

  Whatever I’d imagined she might suggest, it wasn’t that. “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “I knew you wouldn’t like the idea,” she said, “but you really should think about it. Harrison knows a lot.”

  I made a gesture encompassing our cramped, diminished office. “Harrison is the reason we’re in this cubbyhole. Harry Potter had better accommodations than this with the Dursleys.”

  Her eyes widened. “You read Harry Potter?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Does that surprise you?”

  “Well, yes,” she said seriously. “You seem so …”

  “Never mind,” I said quickly. “More to the point, Harrison is the reason I’m here and you’re no longer on salary. I don’t think we should trust him to mess up anyone else’s life, do you?”

  She mumbled something I didn’t understand.

  “What?”

  “He’s dying,” she whispered.

  I had my doubts about that. “How do you know that?” I asked.

  “He told me.” She shook her head. “He didn’t exactly say it in so many words, but I could tell that’s what he meant. And the thing is, if he knows he’s dying, he’s not going to deliberately mislead you or anything like that, is he? Besides, what motive would he have for hiding things now?”

  For a lawyer she was incredibly naive. “I’ve never heard that being on the point of death confers any special virtue,” I told her. “If he is on the point of death, which I doubt. And anyway, his case hasn’t gone to trial yet. He’s still under house arrest.”

  “I know that,” she said. “I went to see him.”

  I didn’t know whether to find her loyalty touching or exasperating. “Why?” I asked.

  She said, very quietly and patiently, as if she were explaining something to a non-English-speaking psychotic, “I told you. Because he’s dying. I’m almost positive.”

  “Because of something you thought he implied,” I said.

  “Well, don’t forget he was in the hospital. In intensive care, remember? It had to be something serious.”

  I closed my eyes. “Oh, right.” A serious attack of guilty conscience, most likely. I was surprised Harrison had been able to keep the truth about his suicide attempt from getting out.

  “I can’t believe you’d forget something like that,” she said.

  “I haven’t forgotten,” I told her.

  “Then you’ll go see him?”

  “Well …”

  “I don’t mean to lecture,” she said, in the pious tone people assume when they mean to do precisely that, “but Harrison did say he asked you to come see him and you promised you would. You promised. I know you well enough to know that a promise means something to you.”

  This was not a topic I wanted to explore at the moment, especially not with Brooke. “I’ll think about it,” I said.

  “But—”

  “Let’s drop it for now.”

  HARRISON WAS SO BORED BY HOUSE ARREST that he would have opened the door to Jeffrey Dahmer peddling homemade sausages, but he was undeniably surprised to see me. “I didn’t think you’d really show up,” he said.

  “I called first,” I pointed out. “I left a message.”

  He shrugged. “Come in,” he said.

  Harrison’s house, like Harrison himself, had a defeated look. The upholstery was worn. The coffee table had beverage rings. There were stacks of newspapers—at least a week’s worth, by the look of them—piled in the corner. The air smelled sour, like unlaundered clothes.

  Harrison gestured toward a geriatric La-Z-Boy facing an oversize TV. “Have a seat,” he said.

  I obeyed him. My feet swung upward toward the ceiling as my head sank back. I scrabbled madly for the control lever.

  “It’s on your right,” Harrison said. “I should have warned you. The mechanism’s a little loose.”

  I sat up gingerly, using my arm and leg muscles to keep from tipping back again. “Well,” I said, “how are you doing?”

  “Fine. Okay. Thanks for asking, Lynnie.” He had a day or two’s growth of beard and an indoor pallor, but otherwise he didn’t look moribund.

  “Enjoying good health, are you?” I asked.

  “Sure.” He smiled. “My liver’s not what it used to be, but you can’t have everything.” He gave me a shrewd look. “Why? Have you heard differently?”

  It was my turn to shrug, which caused my legs to soar again.

  Harrison laughed. “Sorry about that,” he said. “So what have you heard? Out with it. I’m immune to gossip by now.”

  “Brooke thinks you’re dying,” I said bluntly.

  He looked amused. “Brooke is very impressionable,” he said. “Also, I might have helped her impression along a little.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “It’s probably pointless, but I didn’t want her to know the real reason I was in the hospital,” he said. “Anyway, it’s true in the essentials. My life is over. There’s nothing left, whether I go on physically or not.” He said it so matter-of-factly I saw he believed that it was true.

  “Are you at least in AA?” I asked.

  He raised his shoulders. “It’s a condition of my house arrest,” he said, which was not a totally straightforward answer.

  “Brooke’s very concerned about you,” I said, unwilling to say that I was concerned about him, too, though I was, at least a little. There was an air of, if not death, disintegration about him. Because of Alexei,
because of dealing with the crises Harrison had left me, because of the Anne Boleyn Society, I’d begun to believe that no matter what calamity occurred in my professional life or my home life, I would somehow handle it. I had shaken off failure like a sickness. I could find it in my heart to pity Harrison, who wrapped himself in it like a cloak.

  “Brooke’s very loyal,” he said.

  “Yes, she is,” I agreed. “Surprisingly.”

  “You’ve always misjudged her,” he said.

  “And you’ve always given her too much credit,” I said. “Have you ever seen anyone with more confidence in herself? Unwarranted confidence, a lot of the time. It leads her into foolish mistakes. She shoots from the hip.”

  “She’s young. She’s overeager.” He gave me a shrewd look I remembered from the old days. “Not everyone has your self-control, Lynn.”

  If only he knew that self-control didn’t seem to be my strong suit these days. Lately it seemed that everyone’s conversations were laced with double entendres.

  “Also,” Harrison said, “Brooke thinks you think she tried to steal Kojima Bank’s business away from you.”

  I did think so, but I didn’t have any proof, and anyway, what did it matter now? But I couldn’t believe he had the nerve to bring it up. We’d have Kojima, the firm, and a passel of other clients if he hadn’t screwed up.

  “You probably think I’m out of line to bring this up,” he added, reading my mind. Harrison’s downfall had not affected his acumen, apparently.

  I said nothing.

  “Okay, so there’s no ‘probably’ about it,” he said. “But I wanted you to know she didn’t do it. In case you want to do anything.”

  “Like what?” I asked him.

  “Like ask her to stay on,” he said.

  “She is staying on. I’m just not paying her. I can’t afford to,” I added pointedly.

  “No, of course not,” he said, and I was suddenly ashamed of shaming him. He was heading for prison, his life was in ruins—what more did I want? Blood?

  “Actually,” I said, changing the subject, “I need your advice.”

  “Problems at home?” he asked softly.

  I was shocked. We’d never discussed personal things, at least not at that level. I wondered if he’d been spending too many afternoons watching Oprah.

  I drew back, probably with a look of horror, because he added, “I’m sorry. It’s none of my business. It’s just that you look … stressed. You used to look so happy, Lynnie. I know I’ve done my share to take that away. I’m really sorry.”

  “No, no,” I said quickly. “It’s not a personal problem.” I told him about Alexei’s circumstances and the INS’s curious response. Naturally I omitted the part about sleeping with the client and how it would rip my heart right out of my chest if I couldn’t help him to stay in this country. Ms. Cool, that’s me.

  Harrison, however, was not taken in. “Special client, I take it?”

  “Something like that,” I said.

  “Well,” he said, considering carefully. Harrison was never precipitous in offering advice, and he never, despite his defense of Brooke, shot from the hip. It was one of the things I had always liked about him when we were in practice together. It made his screwup—his betrayal—all the more shocking. It just proved you never knew people as well as you thought you did.

  “I’m really not sure how to proceed,” I told him. “I mean, I’m not even sure what the objections are or what information they’re acting on.”

  “Well, that’s nothing new with the INS, is it? One time the State Department objected to a client I’d already gotten an approval for, and the INS rescinded the visa status. They said he’d lied about something he’d done in the Philippines. When I asked the client about it, he admitted that he’d lied, so I didn’t feel a bit sorry for him. He could have gotten me in big trouble.”

  I decided to overlook the irony of this statement and said nothing.

  Harrison looked at me over the top of his reading glasses. “Are you sure your client isn’t lying to you?”

  That required either a very long answer or a very short one. I took the short one. “Yes,” I said. “I’m sure.”

  “Well then, I guess I’d start the appeal process with a request for full disclosure. Unless he’s going to be arrested for something, it will take some time to resolve, and in the meantime there’s something else you could try.”

  “What?” I asked eagerly.

  He told me.

  I looked at him. “That’s so simple,” I said.

  He smiled.

  “Do you think it will work?” I asked.

  “It might.”

  “Harrison?”

  “What?”

  “How do you know Brooke wasn’t trying to steal Kojima?”

  “Ah,” he said. “Because I know who tipped them off about the fake documents. It wasn’t Brooke.”

  “Who was it?”

  “Me,” he said.

  I sat back, being extremely careful not to tip back in the chair. “Why on earth would you do a thing like that?”

  He looked at me as if the answer were the most obvious thing in the world. “Because,” he said slowly, “once the INS started calling me, I knew that the truth was bound to come out. I told Naoko Watanabe at Kojima because—” He hesitated.

  “Because?” I prompted him.

  “Because, Lynn,” he said finally, “I didn’t want them to think it was you.”

  29

  My problem, if you want to call it that, lay in thinking that as long as you didn’t exceed any egregious boundaries, you should be able to live your life as you see fit. My life before this hadn’t even been such a bad advertisement for that principle: I’d left my first husband because I didn’t—couldn’t—live the way he wanted to, and I’d chosen my career because I found it compatible with my temperament and style. Now that my smug choices threatened to end up in ashes, I wasn’t so sure. The pursuit of happiness had turned into a dead-end pilgrimage, and it was up to me to find my way out.

  “I’ve been contacted,” Alexei told me.

  I almost remarked that that sounded like something out of a spy novel, till I reflected that Alexei might not find it amusing. “Contacted how?” I asked.

  “By e-mail. By phone,” he said. “It’s the twenty-first century.” He laughed mirthlessly. “I’m invited back,” he said.

  “You’ll have to be more specific.”

  He sighed into the phone. “I am invited to take up a very high position with the Russian Ministry for Atomic Energy. My job would be devising and directing a new program to prevent nuclear disasters.”

  “Like before,” I said.

  “Yes, but with an official title and a salary that is decent by Russian standards.”

  “It’s an honor to be invited,” I said carefully. My blood sounded in my ears. He could leave. The memory of kissing him—and more—liquefied my nucleus, to put it in atomic terms. Still, I had no right to ask anything of him or try to influence any choice he might make. None whatsoever. “After all this time.”

  “Well, ‘invited’ may not be the correct word. ‘Pressured’ probably comes closer to the mark. And no, it is not an honor. The existing program is in shambles. They are desperate. Really desperate.”

  “Why now, particularly?” I asked him.

  “You know about Chernobyl,” he said.

  “Leaking, you mean?” I asked.

  “Yes, and there are other—Lynn, I’m not free to tell you, even now.”

  “Oh, Alexei,” I said. “Do you think someone’s been manipulating the State Department to make you go back?”

  He didn’t answer me. His silence was an answer of sorts, I suppose.

  “What will you do?” I asked. “You don’t want to accept, do you?” I caught myself up short. “I mean, I—”

  “No,” he said firmly, “I don’t.” He paused. “I miss you,” he said.

  I smiled. It had been only six days. And twenty
-five e-mails. “I miss you, too,” I said.

  “Lynn?”

  I knew what he was asking. I felt the same kind of push-pull vertigo you feel when you’re on the top of a tall building and the height seems to be sucking you down. “Yes,” I told him.

  I could hear the smile in his voice. “How did you know what I was going to ask?”

  “Because it’s what I want, too,” I told him. Truthfully. “When?”

  “Now,” he said. “Please.”

  “YOU’RE NEVER IN YOUR OFFICE ANYMORE,” Jack said.

  My heart stuttered, but he sounded only mildly pissed.

  “And your cell phone is turned off,” he added.

  “I went to see Harrison,” I told him.

  He looked at me as if I’d confessed to an afternoon tête-à-tête with Anna Nicole Smith. Utter disbelief. “Why?” he gasped.

  “I needed to ask him something about a client,” I said. “Also, Brooke thought he might be dying, so I thought I should go.”

  Jack looked dubious. “Is he?”

  “No, but he looks pretty shabby,” I said. “It’s sort of sad, to tell you the truth.”

  “I find it hard to feel sorry for him,” Jack said.

  “So did I, till I went there,” I said. “But it’s impossible to hold a grudge against someone who’s got nothing left. He’s going to plead guilty, did you know?”

  “Mmm,” Jack said.

  “So why were you wanting to reach me?” I asked.

  “Patrick got the job,” he said. “I thought we might go out to celebrate.”

  “That’s great,” I said. “The paralegal job with your law firm?”

  “Yes,” he said stiffly. “But I don’t think it had that much to do with me.”

  “I’m sure it didn’t,” I said. If that’s what he wanted to tell himself, I didn’t see how it could hurt to play along. “Of course I’m happy to go,” I said, “but do you really think he wants to go out celebrating with us?”

  “I don’t think he has anyone else,” Jack said in a worried tone.

  “Of course he does,” I said, though I was far from sure of it.

  PATRICK SAT BETWEEN US AT THE TABLE, wilting under the force of his father’s enthusiasm. Even I could see that it was too much, like praising your dinner guest for buttering the bread. The very excess of it emphasized his deficiencies. Besides, what guy in his twenties regards a formal dinner out with his parent and stepparent as a rollicking good time? Since the dot-commers had brought their youth and wealth to the Peninsula, there were far cooler places to celebrate. I thought about Jack’s comment that Patrick didn’t have anyone else. There must be someone one of his friends could fix him up with.