Patrice frowns, turning another page. “Not that I can recall, Georgie,” she says, then adds, with typical tart understatement. “Perhaps it means something that I never asked.”
He plows on, though, eager for her help.
“Well, I’ve been thinking about it,” he says. “In the context of this case.”
“What case?”
“The one with the four boys? From Glen Brae?” He forces himself to say, “The rape. I told you it was argued today.” George heard a press account of the argument on the radio as he was driving here. ‘Dramatic developments,’ the reporter said. One judge had suggested that the entire case might be tossed out. Tape rolled of Sapperstein crowing on the courthouse steps as if Nathan Koll had not clobbered him from behind. George constantly longs for the days when public discourse was sterile and proper, and not the semaphore called spin.
“And how did that go?” Patrice asks, already forgetting what he told her on the phone this afternoon. It is one of the incurable issues between them that she takes his profession lightly. Her achievements as an architect are tangible. Buildings can stand for centuries. Beauty, above all, endures. Attorneys, by contrast, just mince around with words. But because Patrice so often sees the legal enterprise as farcical, and lawyers as a swarming scrum of uncontrolled neurotics, she enjoys George’s description of the contest between Jordan Sapperstein and Nathan Koll. It’s a virtual travel poster for her view of the land called Law. Even in her weariness, she laughs at length for the first time this evening.
“And where do you come out in all of this?” she asks.
“Not with Koll. Not exactly.”
“So, where?”
“I don’t really know. But I’m bothered. And somehow. Well-that’s why I asked. About whether I told you. Because I suddenly realized that my experience was not unlike-” Now he struggles.
“Like what?” There is an undertone of alarm.
“This case. Warnovits. ”
“Please, George. I’m sure it was nothing like it at all.” She tries to sound soothing, but anger curls her voice at the edges. As she said: It means something that she never asked. She is not merely a spectator, that’s what she’s telling him. Sex, after all, matters. The culture screams it. Not to mention our preoccupations. Like death, it remains one of life’s predetermined destinations, and thus is a land of heavy portent whenever one arrives.
In the interval, her fine features have darkened, and her gaze on him is more alert.
“Georgie, you don’t seem yourself.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Don’t play dumb, George. It’s not you to stew about cases. You’re distracted. Have you found your cell phone yet?”
He’s messing up. He can see that. Her needs deserve to predominate, and her clear need right now is for George to be what he always is. Poised. Stable. Loyal as a hound. It would be preposterous, after all, to ask her to feel sorry for him because of her brush with mortality. Worse, Patrice would take it as a breach of faith. When she leaves the hospital tomorrow, or the day after, she intends to use the term cured. The evil invading cells are certain to have been annihilated and thus exert no claim on their future. She wants George to lock arms with her and march forward with no looking back.
“I’m fine, mate,” he answers.
A knock. His hour is up. From the door, he waves brightly.
“Home tomorrow,” he says. “No more hospital.”
“No more hospital,” she repeats.
In the air lock between the room and the hospital corridor, George removes the paper layers that covered him and pushes them into a special bag he was given when he entered. A technician sweeps him with a bright orange hand-held Geiger counter, a device the same size as a walkie-talkie. He may go. Striding down the garishly lit hospital corridor, he passes the doorways that often frame briefly glimpsed portraits of anguish. Yet his mind remains on his wife.
When George met Patrice, he was in his third year in law school and she was a sophomore at Easton College. At a traffic light near the Easton campus, he had gazed over into an MG Roadster in the next lane, its top down in the sun, and found himself stunned by the sight of the driver. The young woman had the kind of tidy, perfect beauty that would last forever; she would still be called gorgeous at ninety. When she caught George ogling, he pretended he’d been staring at the parafoam dice that hung from the rearview mirror rather than at her.
‘I’ve never understood what those are for,’ he said through his open window. ‘The dice? Is it luck?’ His impression was that the toys would make it harder to see out the window.
In response, he had gotten her cool smile.
‘I’ll have to ask my boyfriend,’ she said. ‘It’s his car.’
The light changed and she was gone, but the next time he saw her, at a party, she recognized him.
‘I never found out about the dice,’ she said. ‘Somehow when you asked me, I realized that the best thing about that guy was the convertible.’
He had thought then that he was getting in on the ground floor-before hordes of fellows his age were pursuing her, perhaps even before Patrice realized how much better she could do. There is never an ounce of false modesty when George declares that he married up, took a wife who is more capable than he. But Patrice was far ahead of him-as always. She knew what he was and had plans of her own. She wanted someone solid, faithful, supportive-and impressed. She had gone to architecture school, been the standout he expected, and then heaved most of it out when their second son was born. When she resumed practice, she worked on residences-not the highest art of architecture, pop tunes when she could have been composing symphonies. But she never complained. Patrice has always known her desires in a far more determined way than most human beings.
He has reached their house in Nearing. They have lived here almost a quarter of a century, having bought the place not long after George entered private practice. It was a starter home, but over the years it became Patrice’s canvas. They have undertaken four separate renovations, each one of which Patrice, unlike her husband, greeted as if it were the arrival of spring. What began as a flat-roofed Prairie-style ranch is now a two-and-a-half-story house graced with Arts and Crafts details and some touches of Wright, and is more than three times its original size.
With the taste of a burrito still somehow lodged in his salivary glands, George stops in the kitchen for a bottle of water before heading to his study to sort what the postman has delivered and to check his e-mail. George remains slightly vexed by Patrice’s forbidding reaction when he compared Warnovits with his own encounter decades ago. His wife at moments is wont to demand perfection of him. He is, fundamentally, her beautiful George- nearly as pretty as she is, well mannered, well liked, the senior member of a family that, as one of their friends said long ago, looks as if it came off the cover of a J. Crew catalog.
This has worked out well for them, because he is equally demanding of himself, a tendency that might well have been alleviated by age, were it not for going on the bench. Judging, to George’s mind, is essentially an arrogant enterprise. As a defense lawyer, he refused to condemn his clients. Everyone else in the system-the cops, the prosecutors, the juries and judges-would take care of that; they didn’t need his help. But a judge’s duty is to declare right and wrong, a daring undertaking, because it contains an implicit warranty that you are above the weaknesses you denounce. After remembering what happened forty years ago in a refrigerator box, he regards that as a pitiable charade.
The incident, confined to recollected fragments for decades, is now coming back to him in larger pieces. And as he settles at his desk, George abruptly recalls that it had not ended with Joan, the young woman who was to become Mario’s wife, cracking wise about life.
‘Sweet Christ crucified, there’s a girl asleep in the library,’ the dorm proctor, Franklin Grigson, told George the following day. At 8:00 A.M., the old dorm languished in the somnolent air of a Sunday morning. Grigson and George might have been the only two young men awake after the night of partying. Grigson was heading to church. George was returning from the men’s room, where he had been sick yet again. He was better now, but his head still felt like the clanger in a ringing steeple bell.
‘Do us all a favor,’ Grigson said. ‘Find whoever she belongs to and have him get her out of here.’ If the girl was discovered, the unforgiving deans would revoke parietal hours for the dorm for the balance of the semester.
George crept to the library door. It was a handsome room, wainscoted in light oak in which generations of collegians had occasionally engraved their initials. The recessed bookcases were fully encumbered with old
