The Juror (7 page)

“I’m not shy.”

“You are.”

“I’m private.”

“You clam up.”

“I don’t babble to men, that’s all.”

Juliet laughs. “Babble? You call it babbling?” She slurs the word
babble
. It’s evident to Annie that her friend is far past exhausted. She sits in the kitchen rocking chair, chattering and pushing
Oliver’s Lorna Doones into her mouth—taking ratchety little rapid-fire bites. She’s overrevving. When she reaches for her
cup of tea she lunges.

“It’s not
babble
, Annie, it’s an
art
. First you say something to puff up his ego. Then you say something alluring, something to draw him close to you. Then with
a sly little subtle stab you
puncture
his balloon. Then you stroke his silly ego again, then you push him back, pull push pull push pull push till you’ve got him,
by this method, spinning in circles and dizzy and staggering and falling at your feet.”

“And then what?”

“Then tell him you’re sorry, you do admire him but he can never be more to you than your
patron
—and Annie, you have to let me listen in when you do this or I’ll kill you, my darling,” and Juliet breaks out into more gales
of laughter.

“Hey Jul?”

“What?”

“When’s the last time you slept?”

This is a poser for Juliet. “You mean
sleep
sleep? Not just closing your eyes for a minute while you’re doing a tracheotomy? Well, I don’t know. What’s today?”

“Wednesday.”

“It is? No.”

“Yeah.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Well then, I know I slept for a few hours Monday night. Not so long ago.”

“Jesus, what are you doing here? You’ve got to get to bed—”

“No I had to come. When I got your message. I mean, Annie, what’s incredible is that you never stopped dreaming, you wanted
to make art and you did it and you struggled, you kept at it and now finally—”

“I kept at it because I’m insane, Juliet.”

“You call Slivey yet? You quit your job?”

“I can’t quit my job.”

“You can!”

“This could go up in a puff of smoke.”

“It won’t! You can be making your boxes tomorrow.”

Annie laughs. “Not tomorrow anyway. I’ve got jury duty.”

“Oh God, I forgot. How’d that go?”

“Fine, boring. The lawyers asked me a ton of questions. They picked me.”

“For what?”

“Some trial. I thought it’d be something different for me to do, you know? But now, I mean after this, I mean, now it’s just
a total pain.”

“Get
out
of it.”

“Too late now.”

“Get
out
of it.”

“Juliet, you got to get some sleep, honey.”

“Naw, I’m going to the movies with Henri.”

“You’re crazy.”

“I’ll take your bratty kid if he wants to come.”

“Depends on who’s driving.”

“OK. Henri’ll drive. But listen, Annie, I want to tell you what happened last night.”

“What?”

“You’re not the only one with adventures.”

“What happened?”

Juliet has this expression, which precedes all conversations about sex—her lips thinning out and then a mischievous flutter
of her eyes. She lowers her voice. “Where is he?”

“Oliver? In his room. He can’t hear us.” Annie leans close. “What?”

“Last night. About two o’clock last night, got called down to the trauma bay. Gunshot wound. Supposed to be a fourth-year
resident there but he never showed, I think he was sound asleep somewhere, so I was in charge. Unless I wanted to wake the
attending, which I
never
want to do. So anyway, they wheel this kid in, this black kid, he’s about twenty I guess. He’s wide awake. He’s feisty. He’s
gorgeous.”

She pounces on a swallow of tea. Then she says, “Guess what nurse was working with me?”

“Henri?”

“Sometimes they let him rotate with me now. They’re scared of what I’m like without him. So it’s him and another male nurse.
I cut the kid’s pants off with the trauma scissors. He’s not wearing any underwear. The wound’s in his thigh. Entrance
here
and the exit
here
—pretty clean, simple, kind of dull really, except who’s looking at his thigh? Annie, he had the most beautiful cock you’ve
ever seen in your life. Not so big really but it was like… like what’s that smooth black stone, what do they call that?”

“Onyx?”

“Is that it? OK. But I mean it had these two gnarly veins, like, like vines… and it’s lying there against his thigh pointing
down at the wound, and it’s throbbing a little? And it’s like, like it’s flared out near the head like a cobra, like a sleeping
cobra
—”

Both of them blush and tilt their faces and laugh wildly, but Juliet’s still worried that Oliver might overhear, and she puts
her finger to her lips. “Shhhhhhh.”

This draws another fit of laughter.

“And Henri, he didn’t know whether to look at that cock and drool, or watch me to see if I was gonna screw up. But I was damned
if I was gonna screw up. I went around to put the IV in this kid. The kid says, ‘Shit. That’s for when you’re too old to
eat
, right? When you don’t got no
teeth
.’ And he says, ‘
I
got teeth.
I
can eat. Eat you right up. What’s your name? My name’s
Richard
.’

“And he’s got these
incredible
white teeth and I’m a little weak there and I say, ‘Let me get this in, Richard.’ He says, ‘Get the doctor.’ I say, ‘I am
the doctor.’ He says, ‘Oh shit. You? Oh shit! I’m a
dead
man.’ So then I started cleaning the wound, and he says, ‘What do you think of that sucker?” And I say, ‘Looks like you got
in trouble doing something stupid, Richard.’ And he says, ‘When I get ahold of the motherfucker did this to me? Gonna wheel
him in here in a
bag
. And you gonna unzip it, Doc, and you gonna just
pour
him out.’

“But I’m only half-listening to him, because the thigh seems a little swollen and I’m starting to think about an expanding
hematoma, which means there’s a block and the blood is pooling up in there somewhere. I put my hands on his thighs, because
sometimes you can feel the tension. And there
is
all this tension under my fingers but, Annie, this guy is really muscular, rock hard, so I don’t know, maybe it’s just muscle.
I have to compare the tension with the tension in the other thigh. So then I’m holding both of his thighs and he’s looking
down at me and he’s saying, ‘You know what, Doc? You got a nice touch, Doc’

“But I already knew that, Annie. Because while I was holding him? His cock was starting to—”

“No!” hisses Annie.

“It was! I mean it was, it was, it was just rising up as I watched, and it was so beautiful—that cobra thing… that, that
wingspread
, you know?”

For a while they wheeze with laughter.

“And I, I was watching it and it was watching me back, and I looked up and Henri was watching too, and Richard had this big
grin and he had his hands behind his head like, like, like this—”

She leans back and laughs straight up at the ceiling for a moment. Then she says, “But I was hell-bent I was going to finish
this examination. So I kept my hands on his thigh, I kept examining him, and that cock kept bobbing, bobbing up, and I was
blushing, you know how I blush? I think I was probably, like purple, and Annie,
I was so excited
, I just wanted to gobble that thing up. And then he reached down and put his hand right on top of mine. And I let him do
it. He says, ‘What’s your name, Doc?’ And I looked up at him and I said, ‘Hematoma.’ He says, ‘What? That’s your name? Hema
Toma? What’s
that
mean?’ I say, ‘It means you’re going to surgery, Richard. Goodbye, Richard.’

“And I shipped him off to surgery, and they did a fasciotomy and I’ll never see him again.”

O
LIVER
now wishes he hadn’t listened. Hadn’t lain there in his Mom’s bedroom on the cool wood floor with his ear to the wood, eavesdropping
on Juliet’s story. It’s got his head all twisted up. He’s at his desk now trying to do his math but the thoughts keep slithering
away.

Of the ballerinas in the Marina City Ballet, four are older than 16, 35% are 10–16, three are 7–9, and one is a black, weaving-and-bobbing
cobra with one eye, and all the ballerinas gather around it and try to gobble it up….

And he’s thinking again of what Juliet said about that guy’s cock, about its
wingspread
, how beautiful it was—and his ribs ache.

She’s too old for me. She goes out with really mature older guys,
wingspread
guys, what would she want with a kid like me?

But maybe the money will help. If Mom gets really rich I can buy a house next to Juliet’s place on North Kent Road, a whole
house just for parties, and everyone will come because I’ll be the son of Annie Laird and I’ll have a Harley and a private
lacrosse field out back, and even Laurel Paglinino will come, but I’ll make her go away, I’ll make them all clear out so I
can be alone with Juliet….

Jesus. It’s stupid and immature, this line of thought, but it’s runaway, it doesn’t care how dumb it is, it goes where it
pleases….

“Oliver!”

“Uh?”

“Come on, get ready.” Mom comes up the stairs to fetch him. “You can finish at Mrs. Kolodny’s.”

That wakes him up. “Wait! You said I could spend the night at Jesse’s!”

“Yeah, well, I’m sorry. Jesse’s mother doesn’t want you. You’re too much of a brat. Mrs. Kolodny’s it is.”

“Mom! No!”

She leans close to him and cups her hands over her mouth and drops her voice to the register of a ball-and-chain phantom.
She intones, “Mrs. Kol-od-neeeee’s.”

“Mom. You’re messing with my head here, right?”

She gives him a quick drumroll of little slaps on the top of his head (she always gets in this big-sister mode when she’s
been hanging around Juliet). She says, “You swallowed it, though, didn’t you? In fact Juliet’s going to take you and Jesse
out to the movies and then you spend the night at Jesse’s. All right? A date with Juliet? Your true love? Now get your ass
in gear. I’ve got my own date.”

“Thought you said it was a
business
meeting.”

“Oh, right. Yes. Business.
Strictly
. Hurry.”

A
NNIE
gets twelve yellow red-throated cattleyas. Annie gets dinner at L’Auberge Conques. The wine is a Domaine des Comtes Lafon
Chardonnay, but it’s the chocolate ganache that does her in. Also the sharp tangy wind on the way out to the car after dinner,
the moon hurtling through clouds, Zach Lyde’s easy elegant laugh as he fumbles through twenty keys on his key chain. Also
the smell of his linen jacket as he holds the car door open for her.

They drive, and Zach Lyde’s elegant car fills up with Vivaldi.

At a corner near Katonah, Annie sees in the headlights a goat resting its chin on the uppermost rail of a wood fence. It glowers
at her with its subtraction pupils. It seems to tilt its head to the passion of Vivaldi’s two violins. A sudden wind-hoop
of leaves rolls before the fence, wobbles, scatters. The world is filled with such unexpected shivers of beauty, how did it
ever seem drab to her?

She asks Zach how he started collecting art, and he tells her:

“Down near where I work, on Maiden Lane? There was an old crumbling cinderblock wall, and I used to walk by it every day and
then one day something caught my eye. I went over and checked it out. It was a
city
. Built into a hollow space on the wall. This, it was like a tiny acropolis built out of clay, with tiny clay columns. And
tympanums? And flights of clay steps running up and down? Sitting in that wall. With city graffiti all around it, and posters
for rock bands, My Sister’s Dead Cock or whatever, and garbage, you know, beer cans shoved in the chinks of that wall—and
then that perfect city.

“So I went and found out who’d built it. A homeless man who hung out on the steps of a church. I found him a home, I found
him some patrons, I found him a gallery. He’s insane, he’s still insane but now he doesn’t have to hustle for meals or a bed.
He can just build his cities. Most of which nobody will ever get to see.

“Anyway, after that I was hooked.”

Into the headlights come mailboxes, horse-chestnut trees, burgundy-colored barns. The scenes dance in, they dance out. All
in rhythm to the Vivaldi. She’s never much liked Vivaldi before, but he’s certainly brilliant tonight. An andante movement,
a violin and a cello swaying side by side. Makes her feel a bit sleepy. She gets an impulse to slump over and rest her head
on this man’s shoulder.

Stop it. You idiot, do you think this is fun? Get all swoony and tender, you think that’s what we need tonight? Oh yes, get
the chemicals simmering. Get yourself immersed. Get a deluge going here and let this chance at a career get swept away because
you just can’t help yourself
. Because you love those cheekbones. Because you’re wild for his car and his off-center smile and off-center religion and
his deep brown eyes, oh Christ.

Sit
up
, you sack of shit.

She straightens herself.

She has an impulse to tell him that she just had an impulse to nestle on his shoulder.

STOP IT YOU SACK OF SHIT.

Says Zach, “You know what I really love about that artist? It’s that reaching back, reaching out of the city to a
prior
city. It’s that, that, that reaching down to the structure that underlies all this chaos—that’s what excites me about the
best art. Annie, that’s why I love your Grope Boxes. Groping in the darkness, in that womb, what is that but reaching back?
Lao Tsu says that returning is the movement of the Tao. Returning! I have a sense, I have a sense that what we call wisdom—”

He catches himself. He grins. “Christ, I’m on a roll
now
.”

“But no, I like it,” she says. “I don’t talk to many people with… so many ideas.”

“You mean so much clutter in the head?”