Pleading Guilty

I quieted eventually. Soon I was back to being myself, primarily sad, staring at the classy ceiling here at the Dulcimer House, where the plaster decorations around the light fixture radiated off in various whitish doodles. We had been here once before, of course — with similar success.

I had felt it was a mistake to start, checking into the same hotel — the same amiable stroll over here, a little frozen up with anticipation and propriety, trying, within hailing distance of the office, to look like anything but two people going to fuck; the same kind of sycophantic desk clerk; the same sort of room with heavy furnishings, a bit too dated to be tasteful. One more failure to connect. I felt rather imprisoned by the cycles in my life.

'I got drunk two nights ago, Brush,' I said suddenly. 'What do you think of that?'

'Not much,' she said. I didn't think she meant she had no opinion. When I cranked my head around to see her in the chair, still naked, still smoking, I could tell from her level expression that this hadn't been a thunderbolt. 'You looked pretty awful yesterday,' she said. She asked if I had enjoyed it.

'Not particularly,' I answered. 'But I can't seem to get the taste out of my mouth.'

'Do you think you're going to do it again?'

'Nope,' I told her, and then, feeling almost as tough as she is, added, 'I might.'

I lay there feeling all the weight of my big fat body, this belly like a medicine ball, these saddlebags of fat that ride my back above the hipbones.

'Oh, don't you get sick of it?' I asked. 'Another Irish lawyer. Another Irish drunk. I'm so tired of being myself — of fucking things up the way I do. It's a tiredness not lost in sleep and only worse on waking. I can't help thinking how great it would be to start new. A really clean slate. It's the only thing left that excites me.'

'It makes me sad when you talk like that,' she said. 'It doesn't become you. You're just asking for someone to tell you that you're really okay.'

'No, I'm not. I wouldn't believe it.'

'You're a good man, Malloy. And a good lawyer too.'

'No,' I said, 'no. Wrong on both fronts. To tell you the truth, Brush, I don't really think I'm cut out for the law anymore. Books and bills and briefs. It's a black-and-white life and I'm a guy who loves color.'

'Come on, Mack. You're one of the best lawyers there. When you do it.'

I made a sound.

'In the old days, you were there all the time. You had to enjoy some of it.'

When I drank, I worked like a demon, billed twenty-two, twenty-four hundred hours a year. I was in the office until eight and in the bars until midnight — then back in the Needle at eight the next morning. Lucinda used to bring Bufferin with my coffee. When I set about changing my life at AA, that was another of the habits I broke. I went home at six — saw the wife, the kid. And was divorced inside a year. It doesn't take Joyce Brothers to figure out what that proves.

'The truth?' I asked. 'I don't even remember. I don't remember what it was like to be busy. I don't remember where I stood at the firm before Jake decided I was a useless piece of dung.'

'What are you talking about? Are you grumping because he doesn't send you work right now? Believe me, Mack, you have a great future with that client. Krzysinski respects you. Give that time. It'll work out.'

Krzysinski again. I mulled on that, then set her straight.

'Look, Brush, there is no future. Jake stopped sending me work because he knows it's his ass if anybody at G amp; G drops the ball and he figures I'm a guy who can't catch a pop fly.'

'That's not so.'

'Yes, it is,' I said. 'And he's probably right. I mean, I liked trying cases. Getting up in front of a jury. Waving my hands around. Seeing if I could make them love me. But nobody's sure I can handle the stress anymore and stay sober. Including me. Without that, I don't like it all. I'm just hooked on the money.'

I felt bruised, lying there, pounding myself with the truth. But I knew I was on the mark. Money was worse than booze or cocaine. God, it could just go in the sweet rush of spending. You start visiting the tailor, buy the Beemer, maybe pick up a little country house, find a club or two not picky enough to keep you out. Next thing you know, two sixty-eight before taxes, and you're looking in the button drawer for coins to pay your bridge tolls. Not to mention being a drunk who used to arrive home routinely, pulling my pockets inside out under the light of my front porch, wondering, sort of abstractly, where it was all those twenties went. (As well as my house keys, which on one occasion I eventually realized I'd thrown into the tin cup of some beggar.) Now I had an ex with a nice German car and a house in the country and God to thank that I paid alimony and had something to show for the money I made.

'We all are,' she said. 'Hooked. To some extent. It's part of the life.'

'No,' I said. You meant what you told Pagnucci. You love it. You love G amp; G. You'd work there for free.'

She made a face, but I had her nailed and she knew it.

'What is it?' I asked. 'Seriously. I never got it. To me, you know, all these lawsuits, it's my robber baron's better than your robber baron. What do you get off on? The law?'

'The law. Sure.' She nodded, mostly to herself. 'I mean, all this right and wrong. It's nifty.' ''Nifty'?'

She came over and lay beside me, belly down. She had those bandy legs and her bad skin, but she looked awfully good to me, a perky little derriere. I patted her rear and she smiled. The flag was unfurling again, but I knew it was no use. Besides, she had her mind on the law now, and that, as I'd told her, was really the love of her life.

'It's the whole thing,' she said, 'all of it. Money. The work. The world. You know how it is when you're a child, you want to live in a fairy tale, you want to play house with Snow White, and I mean, here I am, hanging out with all of these people I read about in the Journal and the business pages of the Tribune.' Brushy, Wash, Martin, all of them, they kept track of the movements of big-time corporate America — financings, acquisitions, promotions — avid as soap opera fans, gobbling up the Journal and the local business press every morning with a hunger I felt only for the sports page.

'Like Krzysinski.'

She darted a warning look at me but answered straight.

'Like Krzysinski. And they like me, these people. And I like them. I mean, I think about what a mess I was when I got here. I was the only female lawyer in Litigation and I was scared to death. Remember?'

'Couldn't forget.' She had been on fire in the self-consuming fashion of the sun. Brushy knew she was a woman in a man's world — just ahead of the female gold rush to law school — and she confronted her prospects with a combustive emotional mix of hell-bent determination and ravaging anxiety. She was the only girl in a family of five, born plug in the middle, and her situation here matched something that had faced her at home, some yes- and-no game she was always playing with herself. She'd do something brilliant, then come to one of her confidants — me or somebody else — and explain, with utmost sincerity, how it had all been accidental and would never be repeated, how she felt doomed by the expectations created by her own success. It was exhausting — and painful — just to listen to her, but even then I felt drawn to her, the way certain free molecules always react. I shared, I suppose, all these alternate moods, the brashness, the fear, the inclination to first blame myself.

'And now. All these people — they need me. I did this piece of takeover litigation for Nautical Paper a couple of years ago. My father worked there for a while, you know decades ago, but after we'd won the case I got this note from Dwayne Gandolph, the CEO, thanking me for the great work I'd done. It made me dizzy. Like inhaling Benzedrine. I brought it to my folks' home and we all passed it around the dinner table and looked at it. The entire family was impressed with me — I was impressed with me.'

I understood what she was saying, perhaps more than she did, that her membership in this world was too hard-won not to be valued, too much a symbol to her to be understood as anything else. But she was smiling at herself for the moment. Gosh, she was great. We both thought so. I admired her enormously, the distances she'd dragged herself and her baggage. I gave her a smooch and we lay there necking for maybe ten minutes, two grown-ups, both of them naked in the daylight in a goddamn hotel room, just kissing and touching hands. I held her awhile, then she told me we had to go. There was G amp; G, the office, work to do.

We both laughed when she poked her fist through the hole in her panty hose. She put them on anyway and asked how I was doing finding Bert.

'I'm not going to find him,' I said. She went quizzical and I told her what I hadn't yet said to anyone else —