'You mean something dirty and indiscreet? Right. I'm not asking you to speculate. I just thought you might be able to contribute pertinent information.' I sort of scratched my ear lamely but it wasn't fooling her a bit. Pugnacious, you would call her look. She's not big — short, broad, and but for tireless health-club hours tending to the stout — but her jaw was set meanly.
'Who are you now? The Public Health Service?'
'Spare me the details. Yes or no will do to start.'
'No.'
I wasn't sure she was answering. Brushy is touchy about personal lives, since hers is always the subject of sniggering. Every office deserves a Brushy, a stalwartly single, sexually predatory female. She subscribes to a feminism of her own vision, which seems to be inspired by piracy on the high seas, regarding it as an achievement to board every passing male ship. She does not recognize any common boundary: marital status, age, social class. When she decides on a man, either for the position he occupies, the promise he radiates, or the good looks that stimulate other females to mere fancy, she is unambiguous in making her desires known. Over the years she has been seen in the company of judges and politicians, journalists, opponents, guys from the file room, a couple of former jurors — and many of her partners, including, should you be wondering, for one fitful afternoon, me. Big and good-looking, Bert had undoubtedly fallen within the circled sights of Brushy's up-periscope.
'It's not prurient interest, Brush. It's professional. Just give me a wink. I need your opinion: Is it he's or she's when Bert dances the hokey-pokey?'
'I don't
She is, in her own way, alone here, a fact which I suppose has drawn us together. Our one misfiring encounter is never a topic. After Nora, my volcano seems more or less extinct, and we both know that afternoon belongs to my wackiest period — right after my sister, Elaine, had died and I had stopped drinking, just when the recognition that my wife was busy with other sexual pursuits was beginning to assume the form of what we might call an idea, sort of the way all that swirling gas and dust in the remote regions of the cosmos starts to zero in on being a planet. For Brush and me our interlude served its purpose, nonetheless. In the aftermath, we became good pals, schmoozing, smoking, and playing racquetball once a week. On court, she is as vicious as a mink.
'How's the Loathsome Child?' Brushy asked. She eyed me in strict warning. We both knew she'd changed the subject.
'Living up to his name,' I assured her. Lyle was Nora's and my only kid, and his insular ways as a little boy had led me to refer to him with what I thought was tenderness as the Lonesome Child. When adolescence set in, however, the consonants migrated.
'What's the latest?'
'Oh, please. Let me count the ways. I find muddy footprints on the sofa. Dried soda pop on the kitchen floor. He comes home at 4:00 a.m. and rings the doorbell because he forgot the keys. The PDR doesn't list half the drugs he takes. Nineteen years old. And he doesn't flush the toilet.'
At that last item, Brushy made a face. 'Isn't it time for him to grow up? Doesn't that happen with children?'
'Not so as you'd notice with Lyle. I'll tell you, whatever you saved me on alimony, Brushy, she got even with that shrink. All that crap about how an adolescent male was too vulnerable to be without his father in these circumstances.'
Brushy said what she always said: the first custody fight she'd seen where the dispute was over who had to take the child.
'Well, she got even,' I repeated. 'What did she have to get even for?' 'Jesus Christ,' I said, 'you really haven't been married, have you? The world went to hell and I went with it. I don't know.'
'You stopped drinking.'
I shrugged. I am seldom as impressed by this feat as other people, who like to think it shows I have something, some element which if not unique is still special to the human condition. Courage. I don't know. But I was aware of the secret and it never left me. I'm still hooked. Now I depend on the pain of not drinking, on the craving, on the denial. Especially the denial. I get up in the morning and it strikes me that I'm not going to drink and I actually wonder why I have to do this to myself, same as I used to think waking from a bender. And inside there's the same little harpy telling me that I deserve it.
I had taken another cigarette and wandered to the big windows. The trail of headlamps and brake lights stippled the strip of highway, and an occasional building window was lit up by the isolated sparks of somebody else's life being squandered in evening toil. Stepping back, I caught a glimpse of my own reflection decaled over the night: the weary warrior, hair gone gray and so much ruddy flesh beneath my chin that I can never button my collar.
'You know,' I said, 'you get divorced, it's like being hit by a truck. You walk around in a fucking fog. You're not even sure you're alive. Maybe the last year, I've realized when I stopped drinking was probably what pushed her out the door.'
Brushy had removed her pumps and crossed her feet on the desktop. With my remark she stopped wiggling her short toes against the orange mesh of her pantyhose and asked what I was talking about.
'Nora liked me better when I drank. She didn't like me much, but she liked me better. I left her alone. She could conduct her international experiment in living. The last thing she wanted was my attention. They have a word for this now. What is it?'
''Co-dependent'.'
'There you go.' I smiled, but we were both rendered silent. It hadn't taken Brushy many guesses. As usual, the mess in my life was its own dead end.
I sat down on her sofa, black leather trimmed with metal rails. It was twenty-first-century decorating in here, 'high-tech', so that the place had the warmth of a hospital operating room. Every partner furnishes as he or she likes, inasmuch as our offices are otherwise the same, three walls of union Sheetrock and a glamour view, all plate glass framed by piers of stressed concrete. We have been here in the TN Needle, a forty-four-story stiletto looming prominently against Center City and the prairie landscape, since it opened six years ago, keeping cozy with our biggest client. Our phones and electronic mail intersect with TN's; half our lawyers have stationery of the General Counsel, Jake Eiger, so they can dash off letters in his name. Visitors to the building often say they cannot tell where TN ends and Gage amp; Griswell starts, which is just how we like it.
'So you're really going to do this, look for Bert?'
'The Big Three didn't think I had a choice. We all know my story. I'm too old to learn to do something else, too greedy to give up the money I make, and too burnt out to deserve it. So I take on Mission Impossible and buy myself a job.'
'That sounds like the kind of deal somebody could forget about. Have you thought of that?'
I had, but it was humiliating as hell to think it was so obvious. I just shrugged.
'Besides,' I said, 'the cops'll probably find Bert before me.'
She became rigid at the mention of the police. I took some time to tell her the rest of the story, about Jorge, the lightweight, and his three mean friends.
'Are you telling me the cops know about this? The money?'
'No chance. It's gone out of our escrow account and we haven't heard word one from them. It's not that.' 'Then what?'
I shook my head sadly. I didn't have a clue. 'Actually,' I said, 'from the drift I got, I think they've been asking about Kam Roberts.' 'I'm lost,' she said. 'Me too.'
'Well, I don't understand why you're willing to do this,' Brushy told me. 'Didn't you say he'd shoot you?'
'I was negotiating. I'll fend him off. I'll tell him I didn't believe it, I took it on to defend his honor.'
