Judgment

by Joseph Finder

  “I told you I would,” said Duncan.

  “We’re concerned,” Juliana said. She sat on the edge of his bed, and then Duncan sat next to her. She crossed her legs. “Who are you getting high with?”

  Jake looked around helplessly, glanced at his father, who nodded. Then he said: “Tyler and Ryan, mostly. Sometimes other guys.”

  Duncan said, “Do you get high by yourself?”

  Jake hesitated. He had his father’s dark Italian looks, the brown eyes and brown hair, but with a light sprinkling of acne across his nose and cheeks. His face began to redden. “Hardly ever. Why?”

  “Hardly ever?” Juliana said.

  “You did it once as an experiment, right?” said Duncan.

  “Just that one time,” said Jake.

  “Dunc, let Jake tell me. How do you get your hands on it?”

  “I mean . . . There’s a kid at school. I think his parents buy it for him. It’s totally legal, by the way. This is so not a big deal, Mom. What’s with all the drama?”

  She ignored his attempt to make this about her. “When did you first start using it?” she asked.

  Jake sighed, turned away. “I don’t know, maybe a couple of months?”

  “Why?”

  “Wh—why did I start?”

  She tilted her head to the side. “Why do you use it?”

  “I don’t know.” Another sigh. “I like it, that’s all. It relaxes me. It takes the edge off.”

  Takes the edge off. Duncan’s exact phrase.

  Jake’s open laptop reminded her suddenly of Matías and the video. Her memory was flooded with images, like screenshots. Of Matías’s hand on the small of her back. Of him walking into her courtroom. Sam Giannopoulos’s pale, scared face. She tried to push it all away.

  After a moment, she said, “Do you get why we’re concerned?”

  “Sure I get it. You’re worried about your career, ’cause you’re a judge.”

  “Come on, Jake,” Duncan said. “That’s totally not true.”

  It was partially true, though. She wouldn’t deny it. But only partially.

  “This is not a big deal,” Jake said. “Like, eighty percent of my friends get high. Some of them get high with their parents.”

  Juliana’s eyes widened. “What?”

  “You heard me. With their parents.”

  “Look,” she said, “we don’t know if it’s even safe for you, given . . . your medical history.”

  “I’m fine!” Jake said.

  “Right, but . . .” She drifted off. He hated to talk about the Hodgkin’s. He resented the way she so often asked how he was feeling, how overly solicitous she was. He wanted to be treated like a normal kid.

  “Here’s the thing, Jakie,” she said. “Marijuana is a colossal ambition-buster. I want you to do well in school, because you’re smart. You have a bright future if you keep your grades up.”

  But Jake wasn’t hearing it. “Sometimes if I vape a couple of puffs it makes me feel smarter and more creative.” He laughed. “Last week I got an A on an English essay, and I was totally high when I wrote it.”

  “Great,” she said sourly, not laughing.

  “Jake, listen,” said Duncan. “We don’t want you getting high alone. That would worry us. If you’re going to use it, use it with your friends and don’t do anything stupid.”

  “I don’t do stupid stuff,” Jake said. “Dad, you know that.”

  “I saw a serious medical study, an Israeli study,” Juliana said. “Cannabis has been found to cause schizophrenia in teenagers, it said.”

  “Oh, please,” Jake said.

  Duncan had stopped nodding. He was watching. Not objecting, but not really joining the fight.

  She felt a flash of annoyance. The old division of labor in the family: she played the heavy, while Dunc got to be Cool Dad.

  Maybe she was just more worried about their son than Duncan was. She worried about how he’d fare in a world where a million kids his age in metropolises on the other side of the planet were being drilled to succeed as Western-style meritocrats. She didn’t care about four-point-ohs, he didn’t have to go to an Ivy League school; she just wanted him to have the best possible chance of making the life he wanted to make, whatever that was. Not to have to settle. She’d read a statistic she couldn’t shake: for the first time in American history, kids had just a fifty-fifty chance of doing better, financially, than their parents.

  Whereas Duncan considered the world a giant trampoline. You’re falling? Well, you’ll bounce back, and it’ll make for a great story. When Juliana thought about trampolines, she thought about broken necks and traumatic brain injuries, because those things happen too. You can land on the hard metal frame or on the ground. And sometimes you don’t get up.

  * * *

  —

  “Don’t worry about Jake,” Duncan said later, when they were in their room, preparing for bed. “He’ll be okay.”

  “But he’s so apathetic,” she said. “He just doesn’t care about anything. And it’s got to be the weed.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Then what is it? He doesn’t like school; he never talks about soccer anymore. I mean, if only he had a passion for something. But from what I can tell, he’s interested in nothing.”

  “Are you afraid Jake’s going to get into some kind of trouble that might spill over onto you?”

  “That’s the last thing I worry about.” If you only knew . . .

  “Sweetie, you’ve always been the good girl. The rules girl. You always keep your nose clean.”

  The huge irony of that loomed before her like a shipwreck: Matías and that night in Chicago, the one time she had thrown away caution.

  “Remember when Rosa got sick, and Keith and Judy offered us Sofia?”

  Their nanny, Rosa, had once been briefly hospitalized with pneumonia, which caught them shorthanded. Juliana had court and couldn’t miss it, and Duncan had classes to teach and faculty meetings to attend. Their next-door neighbors had offered their wonderful Filipina housekeeper to babysit for them, and at first it looked like a lifesaver. Until Juliana had discovered that Sofia’s papers weren’t exactly in order. She was not going to hire an undocumented nanny, even for a couple of weeks. Nanny problems had kept two women from becoming Attorney General of the United States a few years back. It could keep you off the Supreme Court. Why borrow trouble?

  “You know I couldn’t hire an undocumented worker.”

  “And my home office deduction on our taxes? You said ixnay to that.”

  “That’s just a red flag.”

  “Sometimes I think you live your life like there’s a constant goddamned Senate confirmation hearing going on.”

  She looked away. The truth was, there was a spotlight on her. And if she ever wanted to move up in the judicial world—even though she tried not to think too much about that stuff—she had to stay clean. That was just the reality of it. At confirmation hearings, they went after you with all kinds of ammo.

  Meanwhile, Duncan was a tenured professor. He lived in the academic equivalent of a gated community: nothing could touch him. His rebellious streak didn’t cost him anything. But things might be different for Jake. Maybe his dad’s high-wire rhetoric about smashing the system just gave Jake a rationale for screwing up.

  Duncan could coast, and Juliana was pretty sure he’d already begun coasting. Whereas she had further to go.

  And more to lose.

  12

  She lay in bed in the dark next to Duncan for a long while that night.

  She’d waited for his breathing to even out and wondered if she was keeping him awake with her periodic sighs, the way she was flopping around in the bed, trying to get the sheets around her just right. He’d buried his head in his pillow, bracketed by his bent arm.

  They hadn’t
made love in a while now, partly because she felt guilty about Chicago. They’d usually read in bed, kiss each other goodnight, flick off the light. Or Duncan would come in late from working in his home office, after she’d fallen asleep. She was still attracted to him—in some ways more than when they first met—and she wondered if he still felt the same way about her. She worried that maybe he didn’t—and what happened three years ago didn’t exactly reassure her.

  She tried to blank out her mind, to blot out all vexing thoughts, to turn her mind into a large white screen that would allow her to slip off to sleep. Instead, she thought about Jake and his marijuana vape pen and how negative she’d been toward him and even toward Duncan. She didn’t want to be that kind of parent, constantly harping on the criticisms.

  And she thought about that night with Matías, which now seemed so long ago, and she felt ill. She’d stepped right into their trap without thinking. She had jeopardized her career, was on the verge of destroying her family.

  She was frozen in place. If she didn’t rule in favor of Wheelz on their protective-order motion by Monday, the world would see her having sex with a man who was not her husband. An item about her would appear in one of those judicial gossip sites, like UnderneathTheirRobes.com. Then it would spread from there. She didn’t know how, but it would. That was how things worked these days.

  Yet if she did rule in their favor because of the blackmail, she’d be betraying everything she believed in.

  And what would happen once she did rule in favor of Wheelz? Would there be more orders? Maybe this was just the beginning of a long series of extortionate demands. She was a prisoner, all because of one awful mistake. She hadn’t been able to resist Matías, and not just because of his looks, his handsomeness, and his lithe body. The way he’d talked with her, his apparent sensitivity, which had turned out to be well-rehearsed psychological tricks. And she’d fallen for them.

  And what if she recused? Her mind reeled at the thought of what would happen. She didn’t think her marriage would survive it. And obviously her career as a judge would be over. She’d have to resign from the bench. She’d be unhireable. Everything she had worked all her life for, at work and at home, would vanish in an instant. That federal judgeship? A soap bubble.

  She couldn’t imagine what she would say to Duncan, whom she loved so much. How it would slice into him. How devastated Ashley would be when she found out. And what it would do to her already fraught relationship with Jacob.

  How she’d ruined everything.

  It was funny, almost: she desperately wanted to talk to Duncan about what happened, to get his advice on what to do. But of course she couldn’t. He could never know what she’d done.

  She looked at her watch, noted the date. Her friend Martha Connolly, who’d been out of town for a few days visiting relatives, was back by now.

  Martha Connolly had recently retired as the chief justice of the state’s highest court, the Supreme Judicial Court. Now she was of counsel to a big Boston law firm and extremely well connected. Martie had been an important mentor to her. If anyone would know what to do, it was Martie.

  13

  Late afternoon the next day, Juliana was sitting in the Bristol Bar in the Four Seasons, at a table that overlooked the greenery of the Public Garden.

  Martha Connolly wore a beautiful Chanel suit, navy blue with white piping, and a necklace of black pearls. She was in her early seventies, a handsome woman with a halo of white hair and clear blue eyes that could turn serious and judgmental without warning. Martha had authored a number of important and controversial Supreme Judicial Court opinions and was regarded, in the legal community, as something of a demigod.

  She also had a salty tongue and a bawdy sense of humor. She was even known to smoke cigars, on occasion. And she was responsible, more than anyone, for Juliana’s being a judge. It was Martie who kept urging her to think about it. She’d guided her through the whole arcane process, from the seventy-page application to the appearance before the Governor’s Council. That had been intense, the Governor’s Council thing. She’d been interviewed by twenty-one influential people, at some downtown law firm, where they threw all kinds of questions at her, trying to get a sense of her judgment, her temperament. The ridiculous application asked you to list every trial you’d done for the last twenty years, and to name every single defense lawyer you ever worked with, or against.

  And it was Martie who had pulled the strings to make it happen, urging Governor Wickham to appoint Juliana to the Superior Court. Her advice was good and plentiful. Martha was childless and seemed to consider Juliana her substitute daughter. She could be as intrusive as a Hollywood parent, which Juliana sometimes found annoying, but she did her best to suppress her annoyance. Martha was a hero to her.

  Juliana started the conversation by saying, “I’m seeking legal advice.”

  Martha understood at once, of course: what Juliana was about to say was between them only and was protected by attorney-client privilege. Her eyes twinkled agreement. “Got a dollar?”

  “Sure.”

  “Fork it over. Otherwise a single peppercorn will suffice.”

  Juliana took a single dollar bill out of her purse and handed it ceremoniously to Martha. Then she told her story, leaving nothing out. She had always thought of Martha as unshockable. She’d seen it all. But now she was registering astonishment.

  “It was definitely you on the tape?”

  Juliana nodded.

  “Dear God.” She took a swallow of her Knob Creek.

  Juliana exhaled, nodded again.

  “Honey. And you’re always the good girl. Aren’t you full of surprises.”

  For just one night, I did what I never do. Juliana, who did everything right; Juliana, the obeyer of rules, had gone and done one single incautious, impetuous thing. And it was just like she’d always feared it would be: everything she worked so hard for had been overturned.

  “It’s a serious problem,” she said.

  “Oh, it’s worse than that, Jules.” A waiter came by, but Martha dismissed him with a quick smile and a head shake.

  Juliana groaned. “I think the simplest thing to do would be to resign from the bench. Face the consequences—the tape, the public humiliation, everything that follows. Face Duncan and beg for his forgiveness. Maybe he’ll understand.”

  “He sure as hell should. After what happened with that law student.”

  Juliana had forgotten that she’d told Martha.

  “That was a long time ago. And we’ve moved past it,” Juliana said, though she wondered if that was the truth or a mantra she simply told herself.

  “I’m just saying, sauce for the gander.”

  “It’s not . . . It’s not like that.”

  “Listen, it’s not just that a woman has to work twice as hard and be twice as smart; she also has to be twice as clean. Don’t forget, it was Caesar’s wife, not Caesar, who had to walk the straight and narrow. Caesar, he could do whatever the hell he wanted.”

  Juliana closed her eyes for a moment. She wanted to teleport herself out of there. To make it all go away somehow.

  “Men are allowed to screw up,” Martha continued. “Women are not. This is the God’s honest truth. The guy who sleeps around is sowing his wild oats. A woman does the same, she’s a pathetic slut. What did George W. Bush say? ‘When I was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible.’ Imagine Hillary Clinton trying that line.” She sipped some more bourbon. “You’re Teddy Kennedy, you can survive Chappaquiddick. You’re Joe Biden, and a couple of plagiarism episodes fade from memory like they never happened. And you wanna talk about Bill Clinton?”

  Juliana put a hand over her eyes, nodded. “I know.”

  “But if you’re a woman and you don’t walk the path of the straight and narrow? You’re a punch line, and then you’re history. Was the tinsel of Camelot tarnished by the reve
lation that JFK had an assembly line of mistresses? No, it was burnished. Honey, the passage of time treats men and women differently in all sorts of ways. When men make mistakes, the mistakes are forgotten. When a woman makes a mistake, the woman is forgotten.”

  Juliana shook her head. “It’s not like that anymore,” she said. “All the ‘Me Too’ stuff, all those powerful men dethroned . . .”

  “Tip of the iceberg,” Martie said. “A few high-profile sacrifices to the media gods. Then attention shifts and everyone moves on. You think we all hit Reset and men have actually reformed? Everyone keeps different ledgers for men and women.”

  “Maybe. But how exactly does this help me?”

  “Do you want me to lay out your options for you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You recuse yourself, and your career is torpedoed right out of the water.”

  “And my marriage—”

  “Only you would know that.”

  “It’s possible we’d survive this.”

  “Okay. Or you don’t recuse yourself, you stick with it, but you don’t rule the way they want. They release the tape, and your career is torpedoed, and your marriage is damaged, maybe irreparably.”

  “Or I go the third way, and I do what they say. I become a marionette. It’s a breach of my judicial responsibility. But then at least Duncan and I aren’t arguing over child custody.”

  “Child custody? Honey, you could be taken into custody. As in, jail time. If anyone can demonstrate that your judgments were suborned, that’s a major felony conviction.”

  “What the hell can I do, Martie? I’m screwed any way I go.”

  Martha was silent a long time. Juliana could hear the clink of silverware against china, the tinkle of ice in water glasses, the murmur of people around them. Then Martha reached over for her purse, lifted it onto the table, took out her wallet, and began going through it. Finally she seemed to have found what she was looking for. She took it out and held it up. A small white business card, its edges frayed and soiled. “There’s one other way,” she said, handing Juliana the card.