Wallace Wainwright. Maybe my reserves were too thin or he was too far out. Sometimes I see myself pulling him out of the ocean. Sometimes I see myself dying in the attempt. Sometimes I remember to pray for his soul. Sometimes I am glad he is dead.
“Isn’t our boy gorgeous?” murmurs Kimmer in a stage whisper.
“That he is.”
“Your eyes are closed, silly.”
“You know what? He’s just as gorgeous with my eyes closed.”
But I open them anyway and, for a golden moment, Kimmer and I are together, joined in love and admiration for the one thing in the world about which we both care. Then I recall the expensive leather jacket with the words DUKE UNIVERSITY stitched in blue that I found when I hung my windbreaker in the hall closet, and the gold turns to dross.
“Oh, Misha, by the way. Guess who called here looking for you?”
“Who?”
“John Brown. He said he was returning your call. I guess you forgot to give him your new number, huh?” Standing in the doorway, arms folded across her breasts. She has taken off her jacket. Still smiling. She has plenty to smile about. “Or are you trying to make some kind of statement?”
“I called him from the Vineyard.” I am leaning back on the leather sofa, eyes closed, legs up on the ottoman, the way I used to when I lived here. “I guess I must have given him that number.”
“You should get your new number listed.”
“I like my privacy.”
“I don’t understand why you’re so insistent,” says Kimmer, who could not live five minutes without a telephone. A sudden thought strikes her, and she covers her mouth and giggles. “I mean, unless.. . unless you need so much privacy because… Hey, you’re not hiding some woman in your condo, are you? Shirley Branch? Somebody like that?”
“No woman, Kimmer.” Except you.
“Or maybe Pony Eldridge? You know, the two wronged spouses getting together?”
“Sorry to disappoint you. I’m still a married man.”
Kimmer wisely ignores this dig. “It isn’t Dana, is it? I hear she’s having trouble with Alison. Or vice versa. Anyway, are the two of you gonna do anything after all these years?”
I recycle the old joke: “She’s not into men, and I’m not into white women.”
Kimmer waves this away. She leans in close, her proximity dazzling, then reaches around me, picks up her wineglass, takes a small sip. “Oh, everybody’s into everybody these days,” she assures me with an expert’s authority before padding back into the kitchen. “Ice cream coming,” she calls. “Butter pecan. Want some?”
“Sounds great.”
“Chocolate syrup?”
“Yes, thanks.”
Yes, I could have rescued him. No, I had no energy. Yes, I should have tried. No, I would have failed.
Another shout from the kitchen: “By the way, did you find what you were looking for? On the Vineyard, I mean?”
Good question.
“Misha? Honey?” I remind myself to attach no importance to honey: force of habit, nothing more. Kimmer is probably unaware that she said it.
“Not really,” I call back. “No.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Me, too.” A pause. It feels awkward, but I might as well do the polite thing and ask. “Mind if I use the phone?”
“Help yourself.” Her grinning face appears around the doorjamb. “Your name’s still on the bill.” Disappearing again.
I walk into my old study. Kimmer has not converted it to any purpose. A couple of shelves are still in place; the others, along with the desk and the credenza and the chairs, are cluttering the basement of my condo. A few magazines lie here and there, a book or two, but, basically, the cozy room where I spent so many agonizing hours watching Hobby Road for surveillance is empty. The portable phone sits on the floor.
The room feels dead this way. I wonder how Kimmer can stand it. Maybe she just keeps the door closed.
I pick up the phone, push the buttons from memory, and wait patiently for John Brown to answer.
The Oak Bluffs Police found me unconscious on the beach. They were sweeping the waterfront periodically, even in the storm. All I had to do was wait. I could even have fled to the police station in the first place. Only panic caused me to imagine they would close it.
By the time the ambulance arrived, I was already wide awake and sitting up, which is a very good thing, because, while the paramedics were lifting me onto the wheeled stretcher and preparing to insert a tube into my arm, one of the officers wandered over and said to his partner, Some kid lost a bear. I turned my head and saw a water-logged George Jackson nestled under his arm. The storm, passing on toward the Cape, had left George behind like an unwanted complication. I assured the startled cop that the bear was mine. They asked, more out of curiosity than duty, what I was doing out on the beach with a stuffed panda in the middle of a hurricane. Good question, I said, which did not exactly reassure them.
But they let it slide.
So here I am, finally, back in my condo, preparing for the opening of classes in two weeks, when I will once again teach torts to fifty-odd fresh young faces, trying my best not to bully any of them. Bentley races around my relatively cramped space, playing hide-and-seek with Miguel Hadley, whose father dropped him off two hours ago for a play date. Marc lingered for a few minutes, exuding great clouds of his raspberry tobacco, and we agreed it was a shame about Justice Wainwright, and played the old academic game of pretending we had the foggiest idea who the President will pick to replace him. I am grateful to Marc for trying, as the sad summer hurries to its close, to patch things up between us, but sundered friendships, like broken marriages, are often irreparable.
Although August still has a couple of days to run, the afternoon is chilly, for a storm front has moved in, and there are thundershowers. I have no real study in my condo, so I tend to work on my laptop in the kitchen, going back and forth to my bookshelves in the basement as needed. I am sitting at the laptop now, trying to get serious about an article taking a fresh look at the data on the effect of wealth on the outcome in tort cases-my own apology to Avery Knowland, taking the time to see if he might be right.
I stand up and walk to the kitchen window, looking down into my postage-stamp yard, the paved common area beyond it, and then the boardwalk and the beach. I strolled there in the brilliant afternoon sun yesterday, before driving over to Hobby Road to pick up Bentley because I was trying to figure out what to do with the disk that remains nestled safely inside George Jackson. I am dithering still.
John Brown told me that even with the heat, even with the warping, even with the salt water in which the disk has now been soaked, there is probably still a fair bit of recoverable data. There is a need to act swiftly, because heat can “melt” bits of information off the disk, but the ocean water is the real problem: as the salt oxidizes, it could do further damage. He instructed me to rinse the surface with distilled water, which I did. But magnetic media, he assured me, are tougher than most people think. The only way to be sure of getting rid of stored information is to write over it completely, such as by reformatting the disk. And just to be sure, he said, you might want to go over the disk with a powerful magnet, then reformat it again. After all that, he laughed, if you’re really smart, you’ll destroy the disk completely. By cooking it in a microwave oven, say. Or tossing it in the incinerator. Short of steps so extreme, he said, yes, the likelihood is that some data have survived. There are experts who, for a fee, will retrieve whatever is there.
I know what is there. Wainwright said the disk was full of names: names of people now prominent whose cases he and my father fixed.
I could cause a lot of trouble.
I could read the Judge’s tortured ravings and learn the details of his many crimes, I could blackmail corrupt
