Exposed (4 page)

“We don’t work for free,” he said. “What we do is valuable. If a girl can’t afford us, she can find somebody else.”

“Sometimes doing the right thing can be the right thing to do,” I said during the first and last discussion we had on the issue.

“Not if it doesn’t pay. Which is why prostitution should be legal. If sex isn’t the oldest profession, it’s at least the oldest currency.”

“So you’d rather be with a prostitute than have sex with someone you love?” I asked.

Tony smiled at me. “Of course.”

I waited for the rest of the answer, forgetting I was dealing with Tony, that he would make me ask. Maybe even proving his point, if not about power, then about currency.

“Okay. Why?”

“First, there’s less chance of coming away unsatisfied if you’re dealing with a pro. Pardon the puns. Second, money makes sex simple. Love and sex together are too complicated, coming and going. Pardon the puns again. And finally, if someone tells me they love me after sex, I can’t be sure. If I pay someone, I know where their self-interest lies. Self-interest is the only thing you can trust when dealing with others.”

“Forget love. What if your partner just likes sex?”

“How do I know what she likes, and what she’s just saying she likes? Or what she expects? Money clarifies the discussion.”

Like I said, Tony had a reputation. I admired him in an odd way.

The girls I defended were usually hauled in on drug charges or for prostitution. They were usually runaways from Port Angeles, or Aberdeen, or Everett, or Yakima, or Spokane, sometimes Portland, though some were from Seattle or Bellevue and were just rebelling from rich, but often preoccupied, parents.

I would interview them, concoct from the facts some elaborate, sad story about why what happened was not my client’s fault; that they were seduced into bad decisions, they had no choice, etc.

I would clean them up, dress them up if they were junkies, or dress them down if the rap was prostitution, make them look like homely, modest girls from some logging or fishing or manufacturing community (which they often were).

You’d be amazed at how often these girls would fight me on that, wanting to go into court in their brightest feathers, looking every inch the hooker they were accused of being.

I usually won the argument when I would point out that each hour they looked sexy in court could translate into a year in prison.

And then we would negotiate some sort of reduced sentence with the District Attorney, sometimes suspended if it was a first time. It was a fun game, in a way. And at one level, I kind of liked it, because I didn’t really understand what all the fuss was about, why these girls should go to prison for selling what they had to sell, or buying what they wanted to buy, even if it was heroin.

Maybe Tony was rubbing off. But that’s all it was for me —
a
fun game.

We quickly built a nice little practice in my corner of the building. After a while, word got out that I was pretty good at what I did, and I was assigned three women for my office staff: two paralegals and one really, really good “professional assistant.” The former were Sarah and Lily, two of the most white-bread gals you’d ever meet; they wrote a lot of the “stories” we would create for our clients in legalese. The latter was Claire, a black woman, who along with my grandmother, was as real a human being as I’d ever met. She sat outside my office, expertly fielded questions thrown at her via the constantly ringing phone, had a wicked sense of humor and incredible collection of dashiki dresses, and kept us organized.

• • • •

Mark and I got married because everyone already thought we were, and then said we should, and we loved each other, I think. Though love is a damned complicated thing and I don’t quite know how to describe it, let alone define it.

He proposed to me on a beach in Costa Rica with a diamond the size of a robin’s egg but not quite as blue.

“Do you want to do this?” was how he proposed.

“It won’t ruin what we have?” was my way of saying yes.

We were a lot alike.

I took his name because I never liked “Jessica Jones,” and “Jessica Jones-Love” was only slightly better than Jessica Love-Jones,” which sounded like an affliction.

We started to earn real money, and we had even more fun, though sometimes time together wasn’t easy to come by.

A beautiful brick house on Queen Anne Hill, on Highland Drive not a stone’s throw from Kerry Park, came on the market. It looked out on the water, view mostly unpolluted by the stainless plop pile of rock ‘n’ roll museum. The Space Needle served as an exclamation point, a beacon, reminding us always of where we were.

The house was rough, which is why we could afford it, but Mark worked as a carpenter in summers during college, and I know how to muscle a wheelbarrow and use a crowbar. Though it was a struggle at first, we bought it. For six months Mark and I spent four hours a day after work and every weekend stripping it back to the lathe, running new wire, tiling, painting.

We removed two walls to join the living room and the family room and the kitchen into a space that made everybody draw a breath when they walked into that room, even us, every single time.

On more than one occasion, Claire would brush sheet rock dust off my suit when I got to work in the morning, or before I headed off to court. But she always did so with a smile and a nod of her head. I think she knew, in her wise way, that this was the best time of life.

Then Mark and I bought another house, on an outer island in the San Juans, but that one we did not touch, only using it for one summer while we kayaked around looking for orca, talking about having kids.

I think we were both too selfish for kids. Why trade what we had for diapers full of baby shit? Even though we had a maid and could afford a nanny, that just seemed like too big a sacrifice. I don’t know if Mark still feels that way. We haven’t talked in a while.

Mark and I went where we wanted, when our schedules coincided. We climbed mountains, we scuba dived right there in the sound and in the warm Caribbean.

“I don’t know how you can be out there, fighting cars and trucks for space wearing only a tiny helmet,” I said to him on more than one occasion. “Careening down wet streets where a single pebble can send you into the hospital, or the morgue… I’ve already decided I won’t come identify your body.”

“It’s the only time I get to wear spandex,” he would say with a laugh. “I don’t know how you can be out there, in the rain, concrete chewing through the cartilage of your knees and ankles, a target for every car full of punks who think a runner girl is exactly what they want for lunch.”

“I carry mace and I don’t smell good,” I’d shoot back. He’d nuzzle me and say, “You smell pretty good to me.” That could end up anywhere.

We also both loved the gym. We had a pretty nice routine of work and play.

I miss that sometimes, that perfect fit I had with him. I don’t know what that is: some combination of relative size, location of erotic trigger zones, the color and taste of the other’s skin. Chemistry. Pheromones. How I could spend hours lazing my fingers over his skin. Maybe one of my old psychology profs has figured it out. I haven’t, and I’ve got some experience.

You would find some of the men I’ve been with quite beautiful (handsome, whatever) but they leave me cold. Other men you probably wouldn’t look at twice, but they are erotic beyond my understanding. I still have their numbers. Hell, I still call their numbers.

They do things to me, with me, around me, on me, over me, that makes me want more and more of them. I don’t know why; they just do.

Maybe you’ve felt the same thing and maybe you know the reason why, or maybe not. Maybe it’s just me. Maybe it’s because some of them have 18-inch tongues and can breathe through their ears.

I got hit on all the time, whether at work, out for a drink with the girls, sometimes even when I was with Mark and displaying that rather significant wedding ring. Half the time, I wasn’t aware of it, half the time I was, and almost all the time, it didn’t really matter. I had a pretty good life going with a man I adored and who adored me.

Mark got hit on a lot, too. It didn’t bother me much, unless the woman was indiscreet or disrespectful, or just stupid.

One time at a restaurant on one of the piers over the water, a woman staggered over to our table.

“Hi honey,” she said to me, “you know something? This guy’s really hot.” Then she sat right down at our table. She was older than we were, but still very beautiful. She had a thick mane of blond hair, and if it wasn’t her natural color, she spent a lot of money on it. Her clothes were expensive too, and she was in town for a convention of medical prosthetic sales reps.

“Replacement parts,” she said. “Everything from hips to knees to tits,” she said, “but not mine.” She unbuttoned her blouse to show Mark that hers were real. Then she looked at me, as if to imply mine were not (they are) or inadequate (they’re not).

She would have had her bra off too, if the waiter hadn’t talked her giggling friends into coming over and taking her away.

Mark and I laughed about that, but nobody knew how close that bitch had come to going for a swim with the seals searching for scraps around the pilings below our table.

I think Mark was tempted, or maybe intrigued is the better word. A man’s voice changes when his libido is engaged; he has a slight edge, a slight energy that can be felt more than heard or seen. I don’t really know how to explain it, but most women can sense it. Maybe men can sense it in women, too.

Tony would say of some women, “She has the scent,” and he didn’t mean anything gross. He meant that he could detect that the woman was ready to have the same kind of fun he was looking for.

I heard that slight edge of the hunt in Mark’s voice after the woman of the unbuttoned blouse was pulled away from our table. It made me a little jealous, more so than the sight of her exposed skin.

But it went both ways. Once we were at a gathering in the top-floor bar of the building that housed his firm. As
he
and I were standing talking, I noticed a very distinguished, incredibly handsome man standing a few groups over. Every once in a while I caught him looking me over.

Mark left to get me a drink. I walked over to the window looking out over the Sound. It was one of those days Seattle offers up once in a while that makes it seem like the center of the Earth, everything breathtakingly beautiful.

Huge freighters moved across the Sound to Tacoma, while others headed out to sea. Sunlight danced across the water as wakes folded back from each bow. From this height the waves were simple lines overlapping and moving through each other, seemingly unaffected by the interaction.

“It’s a view, isn’t it?” said a voice at my shoulder, soft, yet so deep it seemed to vibrate inside me.

I turned to see the man with a silver mane and a face that had seen time and weather, but eyes so blue and laughing I caught my breath. A cascade of desire swept over me.

“Yes it IS,” was all I could say, feeling like I was 13 years old, again. I was shocked at my physical reaction to this man. He was standing slightly too close to me, but I wanted him to stand closer. I wanted those eyes to laugh for me and with me. I wanted to hear that voice again right now!

As we made small talk, there was an instant familiarity. Then I realized as he spoke, I was getting aroused and he hadn’t even put a finger on me. And that’s a good thing, too, because I probably would have put that finger in my mouth. He wore no obvious cologne that I could detect, but there were waves of some sort of scent from him that gave me images of being naked in front of a warm log fire someplace remote.

Mark got back with our drinks. The man said “Mark, I’ve been wanting to congratulate you on the Maersk case. Jessica and I were just talking about how quickly you analyze and get to the core issues.”

The man looked at me and nodded, as if for assent.

That wasn’t at all what we had been talking about, but I couldn’t disagree right then. Somehow by making me complicit in that lie, this man had put me at another disadvantage, but I wanted to be there. Complicit, owning a secret with this man.

“I’m glad you met,” said Mark. “I’ve told Jessica a lot about you Max, and I think she thought I was inflating the image.”

Max Moore was the head of Mark’s firm. Moore and Associates was known throughout the legal community, certainly, and probably much farther than that. It was the firm of the most-aggressive, and certainly the best-educated and well-supported, lawyers in Seattle. Some of those lawyers had staff who had staff to do research.

I excused myself to the ladies room to gather my wits about me. Remember when I said some older men were erotic? Max Moore was one of them, exuding an aura of brains, confidence, and sheer power that was pure aphrodisiac. With those eyes that seemed to always be laughing at some joke that only you and he shared.

“You okay?” Mark asked when I got back to his side. “You left in a hurry. Max had very nice things to say about you.”

“I’m fine, I just had too much coffee today and didn’t want to leave before you got back,” I said. I did not ask what the nice things were that Max Moore had to say, because I really, really wanted to know, and I knew that would show in my voice, just as the hunt had shown in Mark’s voice for the blond.