Chapter 6 Mute Swan #3
“Only because I’m living with them right at this moment, in Sheboygan, or at least part of the time with them and part here
with my sister. This story is going to take months for me, obviously, more research even after the trial. And then the writing
of it. My place in Chicago is being sublet.”
I told Patrick and Miranda I was staying in Madison with a friend. Any other explanation seemed to require, well, too much
explanation.
He was the middle brother of four, two in college in Madison, the eldest a structural engineer in Sydney, Australia. His mother
was the senior partner in his law firm. His father was a vet. We huddled on the couch and watched Arsenic and Old Lace, which in context, it didn’t occur to me until later, was a stunningly inappropriate choice. I could not keep my eyes or
hands off him.
Certainly, in Sam, and in the most unlikely circumstance, I had found that person, the one whose body was my anthem, who would
make me wonder why anyone ever did anything except have sex. My romantic history, admittedly, rose from dismal and leveled
off at uninspiring, and true, that was mostly from lack of trying—but not from lack of caring. I did want the man of my dreams.
I devoutly did not want to do all the gruesome things that seemed necessary to find him. I didn’t want to speed date, submit
a profile to a web sink, or visit a yenta—not even for the magazine, although Ivy had brought this story idea up more than
once. I didn’t want to be bored, disgusted, disappointed, or worse, required to escape from the romantic equivalent of a house
fire.
There had been my doomed, contested crush on Lucius McCool in senior year of high school, literally a couple of half-decent guys in college, and then my grad school classmate, Davis, a music journalist, with whom I briefly fantasized a life of two crowded desks at opposite ends of a vast, sunny Brooklyn living room .
. . but that ended when his once-lost true love came back from her posting as a maternal health specialist in South Africa.
From that time on, regardless of what Sam suspected, I felt that I was destined for a solo life—and I had further resolved that I would not compromise: If I didn’t like the way he chewed, he was out; if his beloved father was a casual racist, he was out; if he believed in the slimmest possibility of extraterrestrials, he was out.
And then came Sam. The way Sam’s mouth felt on mine—firm, clean, urgent—just the thought made my pelvis clench.
My mother would once say that I was “sexually hypnotized,” but the truth was that I was hypnotized in other ways as well.
Most of the time, I could predict within days when I would tire of a guy or when he would tire of me or when the connection just wasn’t robust enough to last. There were times I could predict the finale within fifteen minutes.
With Sam, I couldn’t see the finale. From the first moment, I never imagined it would end.
And then, immediately, it did.
“We have to talk about this, Reenie,” he said.
“I thought we were,” I said, adding, “And I thought only the girl said that.”
“I mean, we can’t do this.”
“We can’t do this because you’re Felicity’s lawyer and I’m writing about this, and I’m her friend,” I said.
“That’s the gist of it.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” I said, although I couldn’t see how there was any real impropriety. It wasn’t as though I was a lawyer
on the other side or even a court reporter or police. “I’m not a lawyer but I don’t see how us having . . . whatever this
is, could be actually illegal.”
“Not illegal at all. Certainly unethical. There doesn’t have to be a real instance of impropriety, just the perception of
it.”
“The perception of some kind of influence?”
“Yes.”
I asked him, “If a reporter who knew the defendant gave you some kind of information that might help exonerate her, that would
be a good thing, right? Or if you gave a reporter information that would help with a more favorable picture of the defendant?
That would be a good thing, and it happens all the time.”
“It’s more that, if anyone found out, the judge, the jurors, they would wonder about what effect the relationship had on the
process.”
“You know, we have a code too. Objectivity, or the best attempt at it . . .” No way could I expect myself to remain impartial
in this situation. That train had already left the station. My task would be to acknowledge those barriers to objectivity,
to leave no stone unturned, no question unasked, no fact unverified, and follow that path wherever it led. “So this barrier
would pertain until after the trial, but what if she is convicted? There would be an appeal, not that I would be writing about
that because of the time frame . . . Would this perception apply forever?”
Sam said, “No, of course not. I mean, there would be people, if this thing between us continued in the future, who would have
things to say, but that wouldn’t matter. The only way we can do this is to keep it completely secret, just between us . . .
It would be hard to keep this completely secret.”
“We can’t do that,” I said. “We have to end it right here.”
“That seems pretty impossible.”
“We have to. We have to be adult and recognize that what people see is real to them, even if it’s not really real.”
Sam laughed. “You can tell you’re a professional writer.” He quieted then and pulled me to him. “I thought of doing this the
first time I saw you.” He kissed my eyes and the top of my head in a way that I would be able to summon up fifty years from
now, when I was a grandmother, and be able to say to myself, I knew what it was like to feel loved.
“How long do we have? Should I leave now?”
“Tomorrow. It’s a risk. But it’s not such a big risk. Nobody expects either of us anywhere. I’d love to get dressed up and
take you out to dinner, but that’s not in the cards.”
“And I don’t have any dress-up clothes in my purse.”
I asked him if whatever we were experiencing was big enough that we would want to resume it months from now. The thought made
me so sad I wanted to run outside and leave right then, before I fell further down this ladder of stars.
“I don’t know what I feel,” Sam said. “Just that I never felt it before.” He told me there was no one else, not even a contender,
and there hadn’t really ever been one.
He said, “We can still talk, right?”
I said, “Not like this.”
“But communicate?”
“Not like this.”
“You’re right,” Sam said. “Just business. It will be easier for both of us. Reenie, you can ask me anything you want. I promise
that I’ll always give you a truthful answer, except if it’s about a client and if it would violate attorney-client privilege.
Just don’t ever ask me a question unless you really want to know my answer.”
“Me too.”
“I promise,” he said.
Very late, we got busy cooking. Well, he did. I don’t see the point of cooking, especially when people who can actually cook
are getting out of prison every week. As we took turns kneading bread to go with the corn-and-shrimp chowder, I asked, “What’s
the best thing you’ve ever done?”
Why did I say that?
Why, when I knew that would mean he would ask me what the best thing I’d ever done was, and then, logically, we’d proceed
to ask what was the worst thing?
Sam told me, “I turned a pilot at Logan in for being drunk. I told the police. I saw her at breakfast in the airport, before she was wearing her uniform, and she was drunk, she was having a Bloody Mary, and I recognized her when she showed up in the boarding area. She probably lost her job, but there were all those people, a hundred people, flying to Alaska.”
“I meant as a lawyer, but that is so cool, a lot of people wouldn’t have had the courage to do that. And I’ve never been to
Alaska.”
He said, “Salmon fishing. I ate salmon for seven days straight.” I thought of my adventures with fried grouper.
“What’s the worst thing?”
“I found a wallet with eight hundred dollars in it and I kept the money. I mailed the wallet back. I was fifteen. I told my
dad and he said, ‘You’ll get no joy from it.’ And he was right, I didn’t.” Sam said, “How about you?”
“Best or worst?” There was no way. There was absolutely no way. I would think later, You wanted this. You wanted to kick the hornet’s nest. It was too good to be true. “Okay. In grad school, this writer from India went into labor early. Her husband was in surgery,
not having it, doing it, and we were in a class. I drove her to the hospital, going a hundred miles an hour, so the police
would pull me over, which they did, and I was calling the police at the same time. And they delivered the baby, right there
on a rubber sheet on the ground. The baby was fine,” I said. “Now you.”
“A guy from Iran was charged with shoplifting a kids’ watch. He was buying the watch, but his wife called for him and he walked
outside still holding the watch, and the owner took a photo. The guy offered to pay three times what the watch was worth,
but the owner pressed charges. The owner’s sister-in-law had died in 9/11. The guy with the watch was a surgeon in the US
on a special visa, and he would have lost that and been deported. The jury found him guilty.”
“So how . . . ?”
“The judge overruled the verdict. She said it was an unreasonable verdict. That almost never happens.”
The doctor and his family were crying; Sam’s mother was crying; Sam was nearly in shock. He’d been a lawyer for about fifteen
minutes. A few weeks later, the doctor and his family sent Sam a watch, a Baume & Mercier watch, a modest model that was worth
only five thousand dollars. Sam said he wanted to return it, but his mother told him that would be ungracious.
“Do you wear it?”
“At first, I was too scared to. Now I wear it every day.” He didn’t ask me what the worst thing was. Still, the longing to
tell him and be judged thrummed in my chest like an extra heartbeat. Sam said, “What’s the best thing about you?”