The Judas Glass Read online

  Our nakedness seemed vulnerable at that moment. The quilt over us was not a magnificent antique meant to last forever, the collection of one-sided records in the hall was not a storehouse of music that would survive for generations. It was all so easy to love, and easy to lose. I took her in my arms, and experienced the most pleasurable combination of protectiveness and lust.

  Connie would have said, “Again? Already?” And laughed, not sure she wanted to continue, already having collected herself back into her normal state of mind. Rebecca did not know that this was unusual for me. To her I was a sexual creature, easily aroused, not a distracted man with a mind riddled with while-you-were-out memos.

  Her body was made for mine. Her knees parted around me, her heels finding a place on the small of my back. But without a prophylactic this time, and neither of us noticed, neither of us gave it a thought. As though we already knew what was going to happen and celebrated in its shadow.

  There was no hurry. It was late, approaching midnight, but I didn’t want to leave.

  I was dressed again, feeling both reassured and artificial, as I sometimes did when I followed my consultant’s advice regarding what to wear for the cameras. Auburn jacket to go with your hair, blue ties to match your eyes.

  Rebecca wore her kimino, her feet bare. She was on the dark front lawn, reaching for the faucet and finding it. The sprinkler’s glittering spider of water shrank, hesitated, and vanished. The lawn was saturated, a sudden puddle of water appearing with each step.

  “There aren’t any snails, are there?” she asked.

  I stooped to pluck one from the stone before her and toss it into the darkness. When she sat beside me on the front porch I soothed a grass clipping from her foot.

  “I want you to do something for me,” she said.

  Anything, I wanted to say. Anything in the world. But I said nothing. We both knew that I had accepted limits on what I could do for Rebecca, the time I could spend with her, the love I could give her.

  “I’m recording a few pieces,” she said, in that off-hand way people sometimes use to share worrisome secrets.

  “That’s wonderful!” I put my hand around her wrist, around the silver bracelet I had given her, silver otters interlinked, chasing each other.

  “It’s terrifying. They want that Chopin thing everybody does, Fantasie-Impromptu. And the others I do.”

  Her talent awed me. I had taken a few piano lessons as an eight-year-old, when my father said a well-rounded person should be able to improve upon his parents. He meant this jokingly, believing himself to be superior to most of his fellow Homo sapiens, including, although he would not have put it bluntly, myself. He was so self-confident he could admit to being incomplete in trivial ways. However, several weeks of “In An Indian Wigwam” had everyone agreeing that perhaps riding lessons were a better idea.

  “This was the kind of break you dreamed about,” I said. “Why are you so nervous? I’ve never known you to be nervous.” Despite my failure as a fledgling pianist, I had always hungered for music, high music, low music, everything from Bob Wills to Benjamin Britten. I think my lack of talent left a dry arroyo in me, a feeling of failure, a canyon I wished could sport poppies. I couldn’t listen to a driving drummer, or a sizzling bassist, without finding my hands twitching, playing air guitar.

  She made a gesture, annoyed humility, with just a hint of pride. “I’ll also record a few things of my own. Just a studio on Arch Street, nothing major.”

  “It’s fantastic!”

  “I’d like you to be there.”

  Her success was mine. “I’d be delighted. Tell me when.”

  She hesitated. “You don’t have to.”

  I was tugging the black leather calendar from my jacket pocket. “I’ll have Matilda do major surgery on my schedule.”

  “You think about cutting a lot,” she said. “Flaying, stabbing.”

  “Figures of speech,” I said.

  “You don’t have to decide now,” she said.

  “I’ll be there,” I said, with some heat. “I want to be there. I feel honored—”

  “We can go on like this for a while. But some day you’ll have to choose.”

  There was never a time when I forgot that she was blind. Everything about her house, the way she listened, the way she made love, was colored by this presence of a way of life very different than mine.

  From the first moment she asked if she could touch me I had never imagined her to be anything else. But I found myself looking into her eyes, wondering how long I could go on like this, impatient with my life. Rebecca was so unlike anything I knew that I was afraid of my love for her.

  “You’ll do wonderfully,” I said. And yet I felt slightly strained, despite my sincere pleasure for her. I was a little bit jealous of the new possibilities that might open and distract her, take her away.

  “You’re going to stop seeing me,” she said.

  She said seeing this way, just as sighted people do. “I wanted some time,” I said, forgetting the first thing you tell a witness—think before you answer.

  “No, don’t lie to me, Richard.”

  I actually put my hands to my lips. It was body English that any criminal lawyer would have recognized as a confession. I had been about to mislead the court. How could I tell her that I loved her so much I felt threatened? I was used to my life having structure, logic, love providing a pleasant hedge of greenery, nothing more.

  “Thursday afternoon,” she said, “two o’ clock. Just be there. I need you.”

  Unlocking the car, I nearly turned and went back to her. I had forgotten to tell her about the explosion, the missile, the bright scrawl in the sky.

  I drove the streets of Berkeley, taking Oxford Street after passing the stadium and the Greek Theater. As I drove, the phone trilled. I almost answered it, my hand falling to the receiver before I could stop myself.

  I let it ring. I didn’t feel like talking to Connie right now. But I didn’t turn off the ringer, taking some masochistic pleasure in letting her nag me.

  The phone stopped its bleating and then started right up again. This was pure Connie. She let it ring five times before she hung up and started again.

  Some people expect an attorney to be able to pick up planet Earth and drop it on someone’s head. I told new clients to make a list of what they want me to accomplish. I told them to sit down and put it in writing. But, I liked to add, don’t leave the paper lying around. For some reason women appreciated this approach more than men, especially the part about folding the list and hiding it. For all the respect and even adoration I sometimes received from happy clients, I had never been unfaithful to Connie—until now.

  The phone stopped. That only meant that Connie was calling the office again, maybe calling Matilda at home, being reassured by that wise woman that she hadn’t heard of any accidents on the Bay Bridge.

  So what was the problem? Why didn’t I tell Connie to call Jessica Friedlander or Ben Sattler—both perfectly good divorce lawyers. Or Stella—Stella would nude-wrestle a crocodile for the right price.

  Rebecca was exotic, a woman who lectured in musical theory, and played the piano well enough to have prizes, framed documents, hidden away in her closet. Even her handicap made her a creature from another world, and she was in every way too much my dream of what a special woman should be. She had been blind since the day after her tenth birthday, a brain lesion caused by a hit-and-run driver. She was beautiful, needful in a way that wasn’t clinging. She said she had never played as well as she had since we became lovers.

  And Connie? I tried to make a list of Connie’s virtues but the phone started in again and I didn’t bother. Besides, I was beginning to feel that flutter as I turned left onto Capistrano Street. I still took my marriage seriously in one part of my mind.

  3

  “I could fall over something,” I said. A new rug was bunching up behind the door, one of those Zapotec rugs with animal patterns, bears or trunkless elephants.

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nbsp; She didn’t say anything for a while, let me imagine what she might be about to say, put words in her mouth.

  She spoke. “I’ve been sitting here looking forward to this. Wondering what you’d say.”

  As usual the living room was a new configuration of vague shapes and objects; a cello, it looked like, leaned against a wall, couches moved around, something that looked like an Easter Island profile over by the window.

  She said, “You didn’t answer your phone.”

  I had to watch where I was going. I flung my briefcase onto the sofa, turning on one of the table lamps. The little lamp was pretty, but didn’t make much light. I didn’t have to look to know where she was, red fingernail to her front teeth, tapping her bicuspids the way she always did, with one of her unhappy smiles.

  I turned to look. Yes, there she was. In me Connie had seen status if not big money, life with a Name Lawyer. What, I asked myself, had I seen in Connie?

  “I know who you’ve been with,” she said.

  I didn’t like this, Connie referring to a woman she had never met, someone she could never imagine, let alone understand. I kept my temper. It was 12:13 A.M. and I felt fresh. If Connie wanted the truth she could have it. Here it was, the little chat that would blow up my marriage, one of those wobbly buildings too dangerous to leave standing.

  One light wasn’t enough. I steadied a pole lamp as I bumped into it. I struggled with the button until it came on.

  Connie’s laptop was folded shut. A box of paperclips had spilled, glittering metal clamps on the carpet. There were folders in a file at her feet, a white box with black wheels. I was always stumbling over rolling files in the bedroom, the library, white bookshelves of Etruscan matrons and Hopi fetishes.

  “You turned off the light when you heard the car,” I said.

  “Did you see the light go out?”

  I didn’t answer, but she saw my eyes flicker to the invoice from Afri-art, two fertility figurines, ebony. She didn’t sit here under blackout conditions writing checks.

  “There’re two kinds of people,” said Connie, pretty in her dressing gown, something expensive, padded shoulders, lavender. She was wearing fresh makeup. “People who sit on the back porch looking in, and people who sit on the front porch, looking out.”

  Connie was making a mistake. If she wanted an honest talk she should stick to issues of truth. If she began to argue she would be playing a game I was good at, even though it was a talent I did not much appreciate. “Meaning what?” I asked pleasantly.

  “You’re one of those back porch people, Richard. You don’t see the view.” Her blond pageboy hair and bright lipstick made her look smart, and she gazed at me in a way that made me realize how important it is to be able to see, how if you couldn’t use your eyes there was so much you would have to guess about the world.

  But I could see Connie’s uncertainty: she was caught up in her own rhetorical device. Even now she couldn’t stay mad, not wanting to deceive herself but doing it anyway. She wasn’t sure.

  “You sat here in the dark,” I said casually, “working up that figure of speech?”

  “You’re so dumb,” she said. But the power was fading from her voice. She was slipping into the accent of her family, Arkansas poultry ranchers who moved to California. They had gambled their future on Swanson’s pioneer frozen dinner, turkey with mashed potato. They were rich.

  “Sometimes you look so wonderful, Connie. Cool, professional. Like you deserve all those cute little reviews you tape to the shop window. And other times you sound like the girl from Turlock, Turkey Capital of the World.”

  She shocked me. I should have expected it, but I didn’t. “Please be nice enough to deceive me, Richard. Go ahead. That’s what I want.” She was in tears.

  “Don’t be upset,” I said. I meant it. I couldn’t talk to a crying woman.

  “I am upset. I sit here in this house—in our house—and I know. I know you are fooling around out there, Richard!” This was said with tears, anguish, everything she could throw into it, her words bent out of shape into that hillbilly accent she was ashamed of and never used except when she was unthinkingly sincere.

  She won. She didn’t win the truth, but she beat me at whatever contest we were in. I stood there and my mind emptied. I told her I had been unpacking with Matilda, that the office was a mess, half the fluorescent tubes in the ceiling flashed like strobes, it almost gave me a petit mal just trying to set my California real estate code in the right order.

  I should have confronted her about her unfaithfulness. I never had. She left evidence on her desk, notes in handwriting I didn’t recognize and told myself not to read, masculine writing I registered subliminally, Until Tuesday night. This is to replace the one I tore. I could only guess what garment that referred to, what sex-pot scarlet panties, what see-through negligee. Different handwriting each time.

  She had that way of fitting her thumbnail into the line where her front teeth met. It made her look both calculating and defenseless, and with tears on her cheeks I knew there was no way I could hurt her, not tonight.

  “I couldn’t get Matilda at home,” she said. She sighed, not a conversational sigh, but a real one, painful to hear. “I’ll pretend everything’s all right,” she said.

  But she didn’t pretend. She wept. I had never seen her like this. After four years of marriage you assume you know your spouse, but here she was, grieving over my unfaithfulness. I had that only partly unpleasant insight—she really loved me, after a fashion. She had trashed our marriage, left it out under the wind and rain for some two years, but now that it was over she did what was, for Connie, the logical thing. She wanted it back.

  I shouldn’t have mentioned Turlock. “We can’t have a lamp like this in the house,” I said, fingering a cloth wire that led from the greenish-brown base of the lamp to the wall socket. What looked like Bakelite, an early, virtually archaeological plastic, was crumbling around the two prongs. “It’s dangerous.”

  “Solid brass,” said Connie.

  I worked the switch but the lamp would not turn off. I jumped back as a spark bit me and, at the same time, the room went black.

  I didn’t mind the dark if she didn’t. I was suddenly very tired, and I had the bad feeling that Connie half-expected our discussion to be consummated in our marriage bed, the way so many of our fights had ended early in our relationship. I had the briefest image of Connie in her passion, and the image gave me neither pleasure nor hope. The only message I felt from my genitals was a mild, post-coital pain.

  I worked the plug loose from the wall socket, and heard the whisper of her dressing gown as she approached me. When I stood she took me in her arms.

  And she guessed my thoughts. “Richard,” she said at last. I didn’t like the way my name sounded, spoken with such feeling. “You mean so much to me.”

  Round One was over. I had not done well. I groped in the kitchen and found the circuit breakers, a metal door that opens to metal switches. I fumbled for the switch and when I found it light showed dimly from the living room. It’s one of the modest but real pleasures of life, fixing a simple technical problem. I leaned against the sink, trying to tell my inner voice what I would tell Connie tomorrow, after I had given it some thought.

  I gave a quick left jab to the inflated plastic figure on the breakfast counter. He reeled backward, and just as quickly came back to his upright position. Popeye. He was one of my favorite cultural icons, nostalgia blended with my own desire to have a secret weapon, a can of spinach somewhere on my person at all times. I had a shelf of Popeye videos, the great ones, the ones Max Fleisher produced. I had a rare almost-virgin celluloid of the fifteen-minute cartoon of Popeye as Sinbad the Sailor.

  Larkin was in his exercise wheel, but ran across the cedar chips to climb into my hand. The white hamster looked up at me as though he knew exactly what was wrong with my life. A few good Vitapellets and maybe a piece of celery would fix me up. I had bought Larkin at a pet store the week before. His cage
had sat next to an albino python, and it didn’t take much imagination to see that Larkin should either change careers or write a will.

  I took a quick shower, yucca blossom shampoo and a big, new loofah. I wiped the condensation off the mirror. I looked good, just a little sunburn. There was a faded scar on my forehead, a ghostly smile. You could only see it in very bright light. At the age of six, in my family’s vacation cottage, I had run full speed into a wall mirror, shattering it.

  There is a process to going to bed, to losing ourselves for the night. As much as we want sleep, it is a challenge, an emptiness. My habit was to finish with the fussy details, washing, flossing, and then wander down into the kitchen for a small drink of brandy. Sometimes the habit changed, almost without my willing it, and I switched to port, or stopped having even this small taste of alcohol and found myself preferring a glass of ice water.

  Whatever the liquid, the act of drinking meant that I could let go of my world for another night, that today had sustained me and so would the coming morning.

  On this night I went though my step-by-step preparation for bed knowing that an honest man would leave now, pack a bag and phone a hotel. Feeling bruised and dishonest, when I settled under the covers I hoped she was already asleep. Instead I heard her say, “I thought you said those reviews looked great.”

  The newspaper clippings she stuck in the window, she meant, turned into oversized reproductions by the photocopy shop down the street. What had been a few inches of type blared at passersby on Solano Avenue. Sierra Imports—A Feats for the Eyes. That typo was a particular standout. Many a pedestrian had tried to insert the s in the right place, but the reviews were on the inside of the glass. The volunteer copyeditors’ corrections were washed away every two weeks by the window cleaning service.

  To change the subject I said, “Do you realize what a burglar could do to this place? Even this room—look at all those glass lamps.”

  “I hide the most valuable stuff,” she said.

  “You mean that crawl space in the attic? That’s the first place burglars look. They don’t look for wall safes. They march right up into the attic, brush all the rock wool off the heirlooms and leave everything else. It’s months before people know what’s missing.”