“I’m going to open my own practice.”
“Congratulations,” she murmured.
“I don’t have any clients yet. I plan to apply to the appointments’ list.”
“That’s wise.” I grimaced, mentally. This was like pulling teeth.
“I know the politics of the courthouse,” I said. “The presiding judge will know my name immediately, probably remember hearing that I quit, and call you for your opinion.”
“And you want to know what I’ll tell him.”
“No,” I said. “I’d like you to recommend me.”
She smiled. “I see. Well, your old spirit seems to be returning.” She lit a cigarette. “Do you need the money?”
“What?”
“Do you need the money, or do you just want to go back to work?”
It’s not the money,” I said. I knew I could live for a year on my savings. “I want the work. I’m good at it.”
“Yes, of course, but I’m confused. A month ago you left the office saying you needed time to think over your life.”
“I’ve thought about it.”
“And all that led to is concluding that you want to go back to doing the same thing you just left? Has anything really changed?” The question was rhetorical. She went on, “I would tell the presiding judge that you’re a brilliant lawyer but a troubled man. I would tell him that if I was a defendant I would gladly entrust you with my case but if I was a judge I would be concerned about saddling a client with a potentially sick lawyer.”
‘‘Those are hard words, Frances,” I said.
“You could try a case with no preparation and do a better job than another lawyer with unlimited time to prepare, but that’s not the point. Frankly, I think you would be tempted to wing it because your heart’s not in it anymore.”
“You’re wrong,” I said. “I have never walked into a courtroom unprepared.”
She pointed to a stack of files sitting on top of a bookcase. “Your last cases,” she said. “Nothing had been done on them.”
“I carried them in my head.”
“That’s the problem, Henry. You’re carrying too much in your head.”
I stood up. “I can’t change your mind?”
“Take all the time you need,” she said, and then come back to me. Not only would I recommend you to the list, I’d help you come back to the office if you wanted.”
How am I supposed to know how much time is enough?”
“You’ll know,” she said, as though making a promise to a child.
I sat at my desk watching the sun set from my new office. The air was dense with a buttery light; the golden hour we used to call it at school. I could see the ubiquitous red tile roofs of the university. The undergrads would not be arriving for another month, but the law school would start up again in a week or two. When I had graduated from there, ten years earlier, it seemed my life was a settled thing. I would rise in the public defender’s office, do important political work, and there would be a judgeship at the end, perhaps. I started out with all the right credentials, but somewhere along the line the ambiguities of my profession bogged me down. Truth and falsehood, guilt and innocence, law and equity — this was the stuff of my daily bread. Just as I came to see that there were few clear answers in the law, I also saw there were even fewer such answers in my life.
Frances was right. I wasn’t ready to step back into the swamp. I wasn’t, but I couldn’t think of anything else to do with my life. I opened the side drawer and pulled out a bottle of bourbon and a glass. I kept the sunset company a little longer.
It was late when I stumbled in and the red light on my phone machine blinked a welcome. I navigated my way to it and played the messages. There were two of them, both from Hugh, a couple of hours apart. The first was brief, tentative, a greeting. The second asked me to meet him in the city the next day, at a bar in the Castro. I erased the messages, took off my shoes, stretched out on the couch and fell into a sodden sleep.
When I awoke it was light out but the room was shadowy. I inhaled the fumes of last night’s liquor and sat myself up. My body ached and my head felt as if someone was tightening a wire around my temples. I got myself into the bathroom and swallowed some aspirin. I went into the bedroom and changed into my running clothes. Outside, I forced myself to stretch and set off toward the university.
The first mile was torture. I passed beneath the massive stone arch at the entrance to the school, pulled off the road and threw up. I felt better and ran down the long palm-lined drive to the Old Quad. Lost somewhere in the thicket to my left was the mausoleum containing the remains of the family by whom the university had been founded. Directly ahead of me loomed a cluster of stone buildings, the Old Quad.
I stumbled up the steps and beneath an archway into a dusty courtyard which, with its clumps of spindly bushes and cacti, resembled the garden of a desert monastery. All around me the turrets and dingy stone walls radiated an ominous silence, as if behind each window there stood a soldier with a musket waiting to repel any invader. I looked up at the glittering facade of the chapel across which there was a mosaic depicting a blond Jesus and four angels representing Hope, Faith, Charity, and, for architectural rather than scriptural symmetry, Love. In its gloomy magnificence, the Old Quad never failed to remind me of the presidential palace of a banana republic.
Passing out of the quad I cut in front of the engineering school and headed for a back road that led up to the foothills. There was a radar installation at the summit of one of the hills called by the students the Dish. It sat among herds of cattle and the ruins of stables. It, too, was a ruin, shut down for many years, but when the wind whistled through it, the radar produced a strange trilling that could well be music from another planet.
The radar was silent as I slowed to a stop at the top of the Dish and caught my breath from the upward climb. I was soaked with sweat, and my headache was gone, replaced by giddy disorientation. It was a clear, hot morning. Looking north and west I saw the white buildings, bridges and spires of the city of San Francisco beneath a crayoned blue sky.
The city from this aspect appeared guileless and serene. Yet, when I walked in its streets what I noticed most was how the light seldom fell directly, but from angles, darkening the comers of things. You would look up at the eaves of a house expecting to see a gargoyle rather than the intricate but innocent woodwork. The city had this shadowy presence as if it was a living thing with secrets and memories. Its temperament was too much like my own for me to feel safe or comfortable there.
I looked briefly to the south where San Jose sprawled beneath a polluted sky, ugly and raw but without secrets or deceit. Then I stretched and began the slow descent back into town.
When I got to San Francisco that afternoon, it was one of those days that arrives at the end of summer just as the last tourists are leaving complaining about the cold and fog. The sky was cloudless. I parked my car on 19th and headed down into the Castro.
The sidewalks were jammed and the crowds drifted slowly past bars from which disco music blared and where men sat on bar stools looking out the windows. The air smelled of beer and sweat and amyl nitrate. At bus benches and on strips of grass in front of buildings, men sat, stripped of their shirts, sunbathing and watching the flow of pedestrians through mirrored sunglasses. Approaching the bar where I was meeting Hugh, I smelled marijuana, turned my head and saw a couple of kids sharing a joint as they manned a voter registration table for one of the gay political clubs. I stepped into the bar expecting to find more of the carnival but it was nearly empty. The solitary bartender wiped the counter pensively.
I ordered a gin-and-tonic and took it to a table at the back of the room. Plants hung from the ceiling in big ceramic pots and the lighting was so dim that the atmosphere was nocturnal. Here and there in the darkness I saw a glint of polished brass or a mirror. Suspended from the center of the room was a large fan turning almost imperceptibly in the stale air. It was a place for boozy meditation — emotion recollected in alcohol, as someone once told me in another bar — and I was in a contemplative mood. For the first time in my adult life, I could not see any farther into the future than the door through which Hugh now entered.
I watched him step from the brightly-lit doorway into the dimness of the room, weaving slowly between tables as he approached me. He came up to the table, mumbled a greeting and sat down. He’d had some sun since
