The Judas Glass Read online

  When the doorbell rang I was on the phone with Stella. I assumed it was a friend dropping by for a cup of coffee or a drink. But when I opened the door, telephone to my ear, no one was there.

  There was the lawn, the street, the sycamores. Like many people who prefer the telephone and the computer to the concrete world, I felt myself once again baffled at how a house manages to exist, walls, floors, the door swinging on hinges that never squeak, despite the fact that I had never once oiled them.

  I stepped out onto the porch, Stella talking all the while. “If this isn’t the moment, Richard, I can call tomorrow.” A large, flat package leaned beside my front doorframe.

  “I can tell you have news for me,” I said.

  It was almost as tall as I was, wrapped in brown paper. Connie often had imported items delivered here, especially after hours or on weekends. I dragged the package into the room awkwardly with one hand, and leaned it against the wall beside the cello.

  “EBMUD wants to be held blameless,” Stella said. “No admission of liability. They don’t know why the water was blue.”

  “They like unsolved mysteries?” I asked.

  “Are you sure you want to talk about this? I don’t want to bother you with stupid stuff like this—”

  “I’m listening,” I said.

  “They don’t admit it was anything but crystal H-two-oh.” She said it like this, deliberately, distancing herself from what she was saying and, oddly, giving it more force. She made no further reference to the way I sounded, to the fire. But she had never mentioned her pregnancy either.

  “I have Polaroids,” I said. Matilda had them on file, three snapshots of water that looked like dark blue fountain pen ink.

  “Truth issues aside,” said Stella.

  “I can certainly understand that.” Even in sadness I could think like that, easy, minor concessions that were meaningless. “But isn’t there a larger responsibility? How do they know it won’t happen again?”

  “I’ll have a letter off to you in a couple of days, Richard. You might explain to your clients that time is of the essence in any proceeding. What’s the use of big money ten years from now?”

  “That’s a very good point.” Meaning: we win.

  “And I think we’ll be talking settlement a few days from now,” said Stella.

  “Matilda tells me you’re—” Why is it difficult to say pregnant?

  “Very. It’s a girl. You never wanted to go into criminal law, did you?”

  “I did practice criminal law once, actually. When I was an innocent lad. I had a client who had languished in Santa Rita, a man who met a twelve-year-old girl through a pen pal service for convicts. Got out of jail, met the girl in a motel on University Avenue. She told him she was seventeen. There was a healthy list of charges against him, every variety of rape, plus assault.”

  “Great moments in jurisprudence,” said Stella.

  “The story is short, and not one I’m happy to be telling. The girl vanished, the DA didn’t have a real case without her testimony. My client walked. I disliked him so much I swore to myself I would never handle a case like it, ever again. And I haven’t.”

  “I wondered why you paddle your canoe up and down such a backwater, real estate law. Aside from seeing yourself on television all the time. You going to run for senator or something?”

  “Why not?” I meant it as a joke.

  “We have to have a meeting on this other thing, that burglar alarm fiasco. I want to see you in person,” she said. “Lunch.”

  I had taken the security alarm case on behalf of a retirement community, not one of the luxurious ones where retired surgeons drive golf carts down the middle of the street, but a simpler, plainer community in Daly City, elderly people with rooms too full of furniture. Stella was going to lose on that one, too. Maybe this was why she wanted to meet in person, put a little extra spin on the ball.

  I carried the portable phone back to the package and examined the way the brown paper had been folded and sealed. To my surprise, the label was addressed to me. “Any time,” I said.

  “Tomorrow.”

  “What’s the hurry?”

  “Curiosity.”

  Jesus, Stella Cameron was flirting with me. It was like being courted by the SS. Besides, I wasn’t in the mood for any of this.

  She said, “What I mean is—how are you and Connie?”

  “It’s too complicated to explain right now,” I said.

  I opened the wrappings just a little, enough to be able to see. The brown paper tore easily enough, but it was sealed with the plastic, shiny, never-rip tape prized by delivery services.

  “Remember when you thought we’d be partners?” she said.

  What a mad thought that had been. “Years ago.”

  I picked at the tape. What had begun as curiosity was becoming a matter of stubbornness. I fetched a pen knife from a side table, a mother-of-pearl-handled tool about the size of a switchblade.

  “I always wondered when you’d get tired of Connie,” she said. “Or maybe vice versa.” Hormones, I thought. High on pregnancy, and pissed off because her clients couldn’t keep copper salts out of the plumbing.

  I carefully cut away some of the tape. It was this quality of stubbornness that made Stella a successful attorney. She lost cases, she won cases. She came back, like the flu. She asked, “What are all those little noises?”

  “I’m opening a package.”

  The paper peeled away, a wide corner of it. And there was my own, living image—hair uncombed, my chinos a little wrinkled, phone to my ear. My reflection stared back through a snowfall of black, unmoving flakes. I tore the paper all the way.

  It was a mirror. The looking glass gave the room around me a yellowish tinge. I recognized this mirror.

  Or perhaps I was mistaken. The frame was exceptionally hard wood, almost the tone and density of ivory, with worm holes here and there. A carved head surmounted the entire piece. A horse, I thought. Or, more accurately, a unicorn. Its horn had broken off, the break the same sienna hue as the rest of the frame.

  I knew this mirror. I recognized it, but couldn’t quite place it in my past. It had belonged somewhere in my earlier life, in a bedroom, or a rarely visted hallway. At some point it had vanished.

  What made me do it? I saw it happen like a story in the slowly turning pages of a picture book. My hand stretched, it touched, it lingered.

  Damn. I withdrew my hand. I had cut myself on a crescent along one edge of the mirror, where the glass had broken and did not meet the frame. It was not a bad cut, but it stung.

  I have always found mirrors mesmerizing, the way the plane answers the world with an image that seems just behind the surface of the mirror itself. The sweater tossed down on the chair behind my image was as far within the mirror as its twin, one of the cashmere pullovers Connie had given me, was behind the living, actual man. Thinking about mirrors always gave me intellectual vertigo.

  I knelt to find the label. It was typed, an old-fashioned, lick-and-stick patch of paper with from and to preprinted. The return address portion was left blank.

  “Richard, are you still there?”

  I told her I was.

  “Smoke inhalation can be very dangerous,” Stella said. “It can affect the way your brain works.”

  I was bleeding. I sucked my finger. Just having the mirror in the room made the house more spacious, the air like early morning.

  I chopped bell pepper. I thawed hamburger in the microwave. I was making a casserole, something from my days at Boalt Law School, a dish prized for bulk as well as flavor, something I thought would be soothing.

  I called Connie’s shop. I got her answering machine and hung up on it. I called my office and got my own machine, Matilda sounding a little seductive, as though leaving a message was a romantic moment in everyone’s life. Maybe Connie had not been so foolish. Wrong, of course. But Matilda had a certain charm. I took the casserole out of the oven and let it cool. I flicked on the television,
I turned it off. I turned on lights, I listened to music, Bach’s organ fugues progressing like a convoy of battle cruisers.

  When I turned off the classical music I heard the neighbor’s guitar. He almost always kept the Gibson muted, in deference to the rest of us. But I liked the ragged, pensive chords. I once stopped by to pay him a compliment. He was a gangly nineteen-year-old, a computer trainee heading a group whose favorite number seemed to be something like “We Are the Blow Jobs.” His parents were on sabbatical in Israel. I told him that he was pretty good, and pointed out that he used the same brand of guitar as Chuck Berry. He grinned and told me not to ask him to play “Johnny B. Goode.” I grinned back and told him he could do worse; it was the quintessence of American rock & roll.

  My young neighbor’s music had taken a more and more tuneful turn, losing that ugly edge that made his former music so lively. But I was entranced by it, until the amplifier made a single electronic burp and the music stopped.

  Now and then I passed before the mirror where it leaned against the living room wall. I could remember it now, or I thought I did. It looked much older, not only thirty years older, but a century old, as though the thing had been left out in weather, or buried.

  I remember my parents referring to its absence. When it vanished from our lives one day my mother had said it was stolen. “Why they took it and nothing else is something we can marvel at and be thankful for,” said my mother. It was typical of her spoken pronouncements. There had always been something eighteenth-century about her speech, parallel structure and balanced sentences predominating, especially when she was nervous and more careful of her phrasing. “No doubt it was far more valuable than any of us imagined,” she had said.

  It was very late before I realized that Connie was not coming home. I could take no further interest in the looking glass, despite my dull wonderment that an artifact from my early years could, on this wasteland of a day, suddenly reappear.

  I didn’t dream that night. I didn’t sleep well, waking every half hour or so with a feeling of dread. When I would stir, even before I could remember the cause of my grief, I felt the loss, the weight of it.

  When daylight came, yellowish light leaking through the curtains, my hand was numb. I had the impression that my right arm ended at the wrist. I blinked, wanting to lie there, wanting to get up, wanting oblivion.

  It was warm near my body, but around the edges the fluid was already cold. Before I knew what it was I sat upright, and flung myself away from the bed, across the room.

  On the bed was a pond of ink, pooling in the canyons and harbors of the sheet. As I stood there aghast, I couldn’t help thinking how upset Connie would be. My God, I’ll have to order a new mattress.

  I opened the curtains, and the scarlet gleamed, so much blood.

  9

  “I don’t want to give you advice,” said Dr. Opal. “Friendship, affection, those I can give. But advice—” He gave a shrug.

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  Dr. Opal took the white coat off its hook on the door but instead of putting it on, he draped it over the back of a chair. He had always done this, moved things around while he talked. It wasn’t absentmindedness so much as a need to reassure himself: the world was real, so was he.

  “You don’t really like zoos,” said Dr. Opal. He put on a pair of glasses with magnifying lenses attached, giving him a strangely multi-eyed appearance. “Do you?”

  “Where else can you see a kiwi?” I said.

  He smiled thoughtfully, as though he could hear my inner voice, what I really wanted to tell him. “I just got back from Sydney last week,” he said. “My book on the valves of the heart, revised edition. I gave a lecture, signed a few copies. I still have a little jet lag. It’s pleasant, like an out-of-body experience. Let’s see the finger.”

  I sat where I was, my finger wrapped. “I bet you didn’t see a kiwi,” I said.

  “I’m on the State Commission investigating cuts,” joked Dr. Opal. He was a large elf with white hair. He resembled Jiminy Cricket in the way his features were both comical and handsome. His face creased into a smile. I had met Connie at one of his parties. There’s this special woman I want you to meet, from the middle of nowhere. “Let’s have a look.”

  I’d wrapped my right forefinger in tissue. I had always been a little squeamish about wounds. Dr. Opal looked over the top of his glasses. “Bashful? About an ouch on your finger?”

  “I cut it opening a package,” I said.

  “One of those killer envelopes I keep hearing about.”

  “More people are injured by packaging than automobiles,” I said. “I’m urging legislation, seat belts, and helmets for the office.”

  Dr. Opal smiled with just the slightest gleam of impatience. I unwrapped my finger. The cut bled. First scarlet pearls welled along the abrupt line of the narrow opening, like a paper cut, fine, clean. Then a trickle began to spend itself down my finger, coursing across my palm.

  Dr. Opal had once insisted that I call him Sam. It was what everyone else called him, he had said. But it wasn’t true. He was one of those doctors so beloved and so respected even old friends called him Doctor. Friends his own age might call him Dr. Sam. But in a civilization where everything was on a first-name basis, Dr. Opal stood apart.

  “The only kiwi I have ever seen,” said Dr. Opal, “was in the London zoo, in the nocturnal section. Flying foxes, too. My mother used to say God had a sense of humor, look at all the funny creatures He made. She was right. The world is full of wonders. Tell me about this woman, Richard. This pianist who meant so much to you.”

  I couldn’t say a word. I shook my head.

  “You must have loved her,” said Dr. Opal. “I certainly can’t imagine your father charging into a burning building.”

  I sat there, on one of those examination tables covered with white paper, and gave him a brief, agonized explanation, truthful, fragmented.

  He looked at me appraisingly. “You were in love,” he said at last.

  “You sound surprised.”

  “No, maybe just envious. I used to hope there was enough life in me to let me find a Rebecca or two before I go the way of the great auk.” As he spoke his hands were on me, steadying me so he could look into my eyes. “You loved her that much.”

  “It frightened me, too. That much love for someone. Love in my view used to be like a low-grade fever, something you got over. Not—” I controlled myself with difficulty. “Not like this.”

  “Unbutton your shirt.” He put the cold mouth of the stethoscope to my chest. “Take a deep breath.”

  Dr. Opal struck me as someone who had made the right sort of bargain with life. His teeth were even, his stride buoyant. He could be peppery, but people liked him all the more for it.

  My father had dropped dead one Sunday at three o’clock in the afternoon at a tennis ranch near Phoenix. And he had always hated tennis, taking up the game to please his new girlfriend, a tanned, blue-eyed creature who wrote a sports column. I had often wondered how strong my own heart would prove as I got older.

  “I’m so sorry, Richard,” said Dr. Opal. He slipped the stethoscope from around his neck.

  “You would have liked her.”

  “I like a lot of people.” He gave me a smile that made him look just a little less avuncular and more like what he was—a man whose wife had died seven years ago, and who never expected to remarry. He was not resigned so much as realistic. I thought then that I must seem strangely passionate to him, angular, with much to learn.

  He opened a glass jar of cotton swabs, long lengths of wood tipped with white turbans of cotton. “I thought when I reached my golden years I would understand people,” he said. “Do you know that feeling, that expectation that when you get old you’ll be wise?”

  “I keep hoping.”

  He replaced the metal lid without withdrawing a swab. “It’s happening. I think I’m beginning to get wise. I can feel it, falling over me like sunshine. Wisdom. Do you know what I’
ve discovered about human beings, Richard?”

  I gave him a look: tell me.

  “They expect too much from life. They expect too much from themselves.”

  “You make wisdom sound depressing.”

  He laughed and gave a shrug. “Do you know why people don’t live to be five hundred years old? Because we’d go crazy. One stupid century after another—we couldn’t stand to look at it happen, over and over again.”

  “What’s wrong with my finger?”

  His look was quizzical.

  “There was blood all over the sheets.”

  Dr. Opal considered this. “That’s very unlikely, Richard. From a little cut like that. You’re exaggerating.”

  “Look at it—it’s still bleeding.” But it wasn’t. The blood on my hand was already drying to a brown, Turkish-coffee glue.

  “All over the sheets,” I repeated, without much conviction. How much had it bled?

  He applied a bandage. His touch was gentle. In ancient times, when people knew little about medicine, Dr. Opal was the kind of individual who still would have cured the sick. His presence, the way he pressed the white tape over the cut, made me believe that healing had already begun. The adhesive strip on my finger was pristine, white and comforting. I crooked the finger, straightened it. It no longer hurt.

  “What you want to remember is that time teaches us,” said Dr. Opal. “I think it’s the only thing that really does.”

  “What kind of advice is that?”

  “And you also want to remember that Connie will try to keep you. Not because she bears tremendous affection for you.”

  “I thought you liked Connie.”

  “I do.” He gave an apologetic smile, as though to say, It’s just my insight acting up again. “Take care of yourself. Come over for dinner sometime. It’s only a mile or so away, but we only see each other around Christmas, maybe run into each other at Park & Shop.” He moved a chair squarely in front of me, and sat down. “Do you know how few people write a personal letter to me—actually put a letter in an envelope and lick a stamp? Or pick up the phone and give me a call to see how I’m doing?”