The Secret Lives of Married Women (13 page)

She read a second contract, thirty-four more pages of head-spinning legalese. After that, he said, “Okay. That was great. But by now, you must really want to get out of here.”

“No,” she told him. “I don’t at all.”

“You can say so, you know. If you reach a point where it’s making you crazy. It happens with most people. You can tell me and I’ll understand.”

“You’ll never hear that from me,” Nan said. Her voice shook just a little, saying this. “Please, I wish you wouldn’t trouble yourself with that kind of concern.”

If it were possible, she would have knelt before his chair and offered up this promise with both hands. But even as it was, there was an urgency to her words that he must have felt and understood. Because there was a certain acknowledgement in the pause that followed, before he said, “Okay.”

* * *

Nan read to him for seven straight hours that day. Near the basement ceiling were high windows just at street level, and by four in the afternoon, the winter light was fading. Nearly every evening at this hour, a nameless sadness would threaten her with suffocation. But for once it felt as if the darkness closing in was nothing that could touch her. The wind was howling and the panes were frosted over and the room, suffused with a sienna light leaking in from the street lamp, felt like sanctuary.

In the convent,
sanctuary
referred to the chapel, but that was never an association Nan would have made herself. The chapel was a public and official space, with its stained-glass windows and deep red carpet, its icons and incense and velvet-draped altar. But just off the dais was a bare room where the sisters prayed away from public view. The rooms were connected by a single barred window, through which the priest dispensed communion. This room—where the sisters came several times a day for prayer, meditation, and petition—was her idea of sanctuary.

Everything Nan knew about the allure of servitude, she had learned from the sisters. The sun rose and set each day for nothing beyond the fulfillment of their wedding vows—poverty, chastity and obedience—a trinity in itself, of deprivation and self-denial and submission. Each nun bent her neck beneath that yoke and carried it without complaint. Slavery made them graceful, light on their feet beneath that floor-length cloth, floating like dark swans in their bridal black. They slept in stone cells with the doors ajar, fearing no evil and forgoing privacy. These cells were as bare as any in a prison, and there was nothing to set one apart from another. They spent hours on their knees—in prayer, at confession, on rice (a penance favored by Mother Immaculata), scrubbing floors—and the better part of every day was given to strict silence. Alone on their hard straw mattresses, they refrained from doing anything that would bring sexual release; their bodies had been given over, in their possession and yet no longer their own.

Nan thought that if the nuns could see her now, here with Abel, they would not disapprove.
Insofar as you did it for the least of my brethren, you did it for me,
Christ said, and she had always taken that to heart. Christ was truly in everyone, though many people made that difficult to believe. Abel made it easy, soft-spoken as he was: composed and self-contained, measured and resolute, with his low voice and light brown hair, his eyes the blue of a shadow on the snow.

Already she was longing to take that misshapen face in her hands, brush her lips over the afflicted lids, press her palms into the hollows at either side of his head. She used to dream of being touched in this way herself, of having someone fill in what was concave—but she no longer aspired to be milk-fed, sated. Better to be lean; better to be honed and lonely. She was worth more this way, to people like him.

* * *

“I can’t believe this,” Abel said, at around six o’clock in the evening. “I can’t believe how much we’ve gotten done. I’m almost where I need to be. But I’ve got a meeting in another hour, so I need to wrap this up for tonight.”

“All right,” Nan said carefully. She felt weak with relief.

“Listen,” he said. “I can’t tell you how extraordinary this has been. And I know this is short notice, so I’ll understand if it’s not possible, but is there any chance you could come back tomorrow?”

“Just tell me what time.”

* * *

That night she went back to the single room she lived in, a room not so different from Abel’s basement, stripped off her blood-stained blouse and lay down on the narrow bed. She felt wrung out like a rag, as if she were emerging from a high fever: a dazed, languid, almost convalescent exhaustion, shot through with the warmth that always came to her in the wake of hard use. She was already more than half in love with him for exacting so much from her during what was supposed to have been an interview. He was a way out of what she was doing now; he was someone she could serve. And he wanted her early the next day.

She fell asleep within minutes, drugged by this reassurance, and in the morning she got up and did it all again.

* * *

And so in this way Nan became his reader, a job that filled about twelve hours a week. She read to him for a little over a month, an interval that seemed to assure him that she was reliable, tireless and apparently sane. So when a position as his full-time assistant opened up in his office—a job where she could answer the phone, manage his calendar, and read to him as well on a daily basis—he offered it to her and she leapt at it.

“You’ve been here four years,” Mistress DeVille said when Nan gave the Nutcracker notice. “You really think you’ll be able to stand a straight job?”

“I could if I had the right boss.”

* * *

Abel’s office was at the edge of Bedford, about two miles from her rented room. She walked to work each weekday morning and back again in the evening, a ritual that began on the first day of her full-time employment. Everything looked different that morning: the snow dusting every surface, the trees glistening with ice, the sunrise glazing the dampened streets. Each step was bringing her closer to him, and the world was newly beautiful.

I was listening to this account in the corner booth of an otherwise empty tavern. I had arranged this meeting; in fact, I’d been compelled to arrange it and now I was blowing off the whole afternoon for it.

The young woman across from me had blindsided me during my last trial, in a way nothing else had in my entire legal career. There are many reasons I’m considered one of the best defense attorneys in Kings County, and one of them is my ability to anticipate every aspect of a courtroom battle.

My first boss—Milton Willis—was a master of litigation and he molded me in his own image. A heavy glass paperweight on his desk was inscribed with these words:
For every hand extended, another lies in wait.
It was a line from a song called
Anticipate.

His rules were fixed and inflexible, and I thought of them every day.
Never ask a question in a trial unless you already know the answer. Never create an opening for the unexpected. Control every aspect of what unfolds on your watch.

Whenever I thought I was on top of any and every possibility, he would urge me to think again.
This is a complicated game,
he liked to say,
and there are sixty-four squares on the chessboard.

This was guidance I lived by, and by the time I strode into the courtroom on expensive heels and said, “My name is Lillian Reeve and I represent Abel Nathanson,” I believed I had a true blueprint of every box on the board before me.

Nan had obliterated this conviction and dealt a hard blow to my confidence. I needed to understand what happened.

I was dressed down for this encounter, in jeans and a gray t-shirt. I was trying for a vibe that was casual and cozy, one that would lower her guard. When the waitress came over, I asked for a French onion soup and a beer.

But Nan ordered nothing. She sat across from me in the dimly lit booth, her back perfectly straight. She wore a highnecked blouse with a bow at the throat and she held herself still as she spoke. Her gaze was direct and her presence unsettling.

A few days earlier, when I’d called to ask whether we could meet, she had astonished me by saying, “I’ll only talk with you if we can officially deem the meeting a
pro bono
legal consultation. You’ll need to sign something to that effect. I need an airtight assurance of confidentiality.”

I remembered the first time I met her. Abel had been indicted the day before. He was at the firm to retain my services. Nan was at his side; he held her arm with one hand, his cane with the other.

They were a striking pair. Despite his odd facial disfigurement and his blindness, there was something suave about him, an air of serene self-possession. And her looks were arresting; she was slender and delicate with wide gray eyes and the innocent gaze of some woodland creature. Improbably proper, even prim, and yet I could sense an abject yearning beneath her composure, an unseemly need having to do with her boss. I wondered if they were sleeping together.

At the conference room table, she took a slate and stylus from her shoulder bag, along with a legal-sized manila folder. Written on its tab was the name of our firm,
Reeve and Rezac,
and beneath that was—presumably—the Braille translation. As I passed him written materials, Nan affixed them to her slate and created a tactile label for each one: the firm brochure, a retainer agreement, a breakdown of the various fees he might incur. She maintained the same impeccable posture in my office as here in the tavern: spine straight, shoulders set, even as she labored over the paper. She was the very picture of intelligence and competence, and fleetingly I wondered why she had chosen such a servile line of work. But then, I saw this all the time: young women who could do anything but were apparently content to assist some man.

I had never met Abel, but I’d heard of him. As the city’s only non-profit industrial developer—and blind to boot—he was often in the local news. And until now, it had all been good press. He was known for reinventing the most unlikely buildings (a former rope factory, a defunct armory, an abandoned cathedral) and making them newly beautiful and serviceable, usually to the benefit of some downtrodden sector. One of them, I didn’t remember which, was now a charter school for autistic children.

“So, Mr. Nathanson,” I said, when we were seated at the conference table. “To what do I owe the honor?”

“Well, to put it bluntly,” he said, “I fucked up. Badly. What I did is frankly indefensible. I don’t imagine there’s much chance of being cleared of the charges against me. But I am looking for damage control, insofar as that might be possible. And I very much hope to avoid even a brief stint in prison.”

“I’d like to assist with both of those goals,” I said, in the calm voice I reserved for such moments, when a client is laying the broken pieces of his life before me and begging for some measure of restoration.

“I’ve figured out what happened,” Abel went on. “And there’s no doubt I was set up. That doesn’t excuse my actions. It just explains how I got caught so fast.”

“Please tell me the story,” I said.

“Well, first let me ask: do you know who John Bonney is?”

“The real estate developer?”

“Yes. Good. All right, so more than two years ago, he and I were vying for the same piece of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. I’d been a thorn in his backside many times before, but I don’t think he seriously hated me until I won that bid. He was the city’s favorite son for a long time, for reasons I probably don’t need to break down for you.”

“Well, I know he has deep pockets and a lot of...influence,” I said.

“Yes. He’s bankrolled a lot of political careers on the local level. It was easy to be cynical whenever the mayor handed him civic development projects and city-owned properties. By contrast, I was the kind of underdog that no one begrudged: young, blind, self-made, in the non-profit sector. I’ve heard that, in Bonney’s inner circle, they call me
Poster Boy.”

“Well, that’s not very nice,” I said. “Though I’ve been called worse.” I was trying to put him at ease. His blindness complicated this: he couldn’t see the framed credentials on my wall, the posh decor of my corner office, the framed desk photos of my infant niece and childhood dog. (For building rapport with a new client, I’d found that nothing was better than a picture of a dog.) And it worked. The corner of his mouth went up in a half-smile and I realized I liked him. It wasn’t essential to like my clients—and often I didn’t—but it helped.

“Anyway,” Abel went on. “Within the last six months, we both submitted proposals for the Red Hook waterfront. That’s really what this is all about. Bonney was afraid that history would repeat itself, and he wanted to knock me out of the running.”

“And how did he do that?” I asked, pen poised over a legal tablet.

“Well, soon after we submitted competing proposals for the property, a firm called Apex, which I’d never worked with, started to court me very aggressively. The rep’s name was Tom Roscoe and the bids he submitted to me should have been a red flag, because they were very, very low. Too low. He undercut his competitors’ rates by so much that it made me wonder how the hell his firm would have a profit margin.”

“And?” I said.

“Well, a little digging, far too late, reveals that Roscoe’s not even a full-time employee at Apex. He just moonlights there from time to time because he’s the owner’s nephew. His real job is with the NYPD. He’s a cop. But here’s the best part. The boss over at Apex—Roscoe’s uncle? He’s Bonney’s brother-in-law.”

“So you think the whole bid was a ruse.”

“There’s no doubt in my mind. They wanted to get me into bed with Roscoe so he could rake up some muck. And I cringe to think about how fast he managed that.”

Abel paused in the telling. Beside him, Nan was composed and still, eyes cast downward. Still, there was something in her bearing that made it plain to me: she was as pained by this situation as if she were his wife.

“Please go on,” I said.

“Okay, well, I won’t go into the whole sob story, but around this time my sister was in serious financial straits. She’s a single mom with a special-needs kid and caring for him is a full-time job. She’s always scrambling around for work she can do from home after he goes to bed, like stuffing envelopes or data entry. As you can imagine, it’s brutal. She’s always exhausted, always broke, but things were at an all-time low after she bought this disaster of a house a few miles upstate.”