The Secret Lives of Married Women (18 page)

“We are in desperate need of sighted people who know Braille,” the earnest, grandmotherly director told her when she went there. Abel predicted that they would pay her more than he had, and as with so many other things, he was right. She took the train to work now, and felt grateful when it was Friday like everyone else.

It was disconcerting the first time Abel came into my office without Nan. At her place by his side was a splendid German shepherd in a harness. I didn’t yet know she was gone for good. I assumed she was out sick or maybe back at the office.

“What a beautiful dog,” I said. I knew that only the owner was supposed to touch a guide dog, but I longed to stroke this one. “Where is Nan today?”

Abel seemed to hesitate before answering. “Nan...well, Nan is no longer with me.”

“What?”

When he said nothing, I added, “I’m sorry, it’s just...she seemed so devoted to you. Did she...did she leave because of the scandal?”

“No. She didn’t leave. That is, she did, but because I decided to let her go.”

“You fired her? Why?”

“Well,” he said, clearly pained, “I wouldn’t use the word ‘fire.’ The official story is that I realized I needed someone with a real estate license, and a friend of mine at the Lighthouse was prepared to offer her better compensation anyway.”

“And the real story?”

“The real story is that she was a perfect assistant, and even in two lifetimes, I couldn’t hope to find a better one. But—”

I could see how hard it was for him to go on.

“You don’t have to tell me if you’d rather not,” I said.

“No, it’s okay. Where else would I have the luxury of ironclad confidentiality?”

I smiled encouragingly, then realized he couldn’t see this. I made myself murmur encouragingly instead.

“Look,” he said, “as I’m sure you can imagine, the relationship with an assistant is an intimate one, and because I’m blind, it’s especially so with me. What other married CEO would walk around in public, holding his assistant’s arm? In hindsight, there was probably a little too much symbiosis there, but anyway. Without going into too much detail...well, she crossed a line. Nothing sexual happened, if that’s how it sounds. No indiscretion in the usual sense. And at first, I thought I could get past it. But I couldn’t. Maybe if all this other stuff weren’t going on, it would have been different. But once that can of snakes was open, it just created this incredible tension. And there’s so much other tension right now that any more is untenable.”

“I understand,” I said. “And I’m sorry.”

We turned then to the matters at hand. I informed Abel that the issue of
predisposition
is often what makes or breaks an entrapment defense.

“We have to demonstrate that you had no predisposition to commit this crime. A while back, you mentioned returning Christmas gifts—even bottles of champagne—to corporate vendors, rather than risk the appearance of accepting a bribe. We need to compile a list of those vendors and explore their suitability as witnesses...”

After Abel left, I went back into my office and locked the door. I needed to finally call my sister back—in the face of my ongoing silence, her messages were becoming distraught—but I didn’t want to speak to her from home, where Darren could overhear.

“I have to talk with you, Leda,” I said the moment she picked up the phone.

There was a startled pause and then she sputtered in indignation. “Oh, and I haven’t been around? I haven’t taken your calls? Haven’t returned them either? Did you leave a bunch of messages that no one could be bothered to answer?”

“All right, all right,” I said. I was a little taken aback. “I’ll admit I was very upset about something, and I needed some time before I could have a conversation.”

“Upset about what?”

“Okay, listen.” At the back of my desk drawer was a very old, very stale, nearly empty pack of cigarettes and now I fished one from the box and cracked open the window to smoke it. “Last time we talked? Remember I needed to check whether our passports were expired? Well, I went into Darren’s file cabinet to look for them. And—well—I found a porn video.”

“Oh for Christ’s sake, Lily,” Leda said after a long moment. “Is that what all this drama is about? Good God. Give the guy a break, would you? Unless it’s little boys or something.”

“It’s not little boys,” I said, and shut my eyes. “It’s you.”

It was barely audible, but I heard it: her quick intake of breath. A sound of surprise and distress. It was a long moment before she spoke.

“Payback?
Is that what you’re talking about?”

“Yes.”

“Well. Lily. Look. I was really, really young,” she said. She was very flustered. “I’m not sure who you’re mad at, Darren or me. Knowing you, probably both of us. But it was a long time ago for me, it’s ancient history. I was practically a kid. What do you care, anyway? What I do with my life is my business.”

“Yeah, God forbid you should ever think about how something like that could affect me. Now that I think of it, with my high-profile cases, it’s like a miracle that no tabloid has broken it out and speculated that it was me. But I’m sure that possibility never crossed your mind, since you don’t tend to think much about anyone besides yourself.”

“Yeah, I admit that wasn’t my main concern when we were nineteen and you weren’t even in law school yet. Plus, I mean, I’m kind of incognito. It’s not my real name—”

“Leda Swann?”

“—and I had a platinum dye-job. And blue contacts. I’d be shocked if anyone ever linked it to you. It would take someone who’s known you from way back, someone who knows you really well.”

“Why, yes,” I said, “Like Darren, for instance, now that you mention it. I mean, maybe you can’t appreciate this, but it
is
just a slight bit awkward knowing my husband’s jerking off to my
sister’s
porn performance.”

“Well, I—I mean...that’s not really my fault, Lily, Darren wasn’t even in your life back then! And...and I get why Darren would buy something like that. I mean, come on, be fair. Imagine being in his place. It must have felt like seeing his wife on a porn store shelf. How could he
not...I
mean...how could he not at least
look?”

“Well,” I said, blowing smoke out the window, “he didn’t just look. He bought the thing and hid it from me for who knows how many years. And how would he have found it in the first place if he wasn’t already on some porn site?”

“Yeah, that’s a great point. He went to a porn site! You’d better kick his ass to the curb along with the morning trash and every other man in the free world.”

“Oh—right—all men do it, that’s just the way they are, and we can’t expect any better from them, and so on and so forth
ad nauseam.
But the point is, Darren doesn’t just pretend to be above porn, he’s always joined me in actively
condemning
it. Which makes him not just weak and sleazy, but a fraud. A hypocrite.”

When Leda was silent, I continued, “But that doesn’t really involve you. We can leave that between him and me. What I want you to tell me is: why
this
movie? I mean, okay, you’re an exhibitionist and you want to fuck your boyfriend on camera and know that other people are paying to watch. Fine. But why does it have to be the most degrading story line imaginable?”

“Is that a serious question? Really? I mean, please. Who cares what the storyline was? If it didn’t feel degrading to me, then why should you get bent out of shape about it?”

But before I had a chance to consider my answer to this, my sister suddenly said, “You know what I think?”

“What?”

“I mean, you want to know the real reason I think this is bothering you?”

I would not ask again. I would not be
baited.
I resolved to just wait her out. I didn’t have to wait long.

“I bet it’s because
you can’t stand that it gets you fucking hot
.”

I hung up the phone. I resisted—just barely—the urge to throw it across the room. I took a deep angry drag on my cigarette and put it out on the windowsill, taking satisfaction in the way it scarred the paint.

How dare she? The smug insinuating fucking bitch.

The red light flashed on my phone, which meant an incoming call was being held at the front desk. I grabbed the receiver and addressed the receptionist.

“Yes, Penny?”

“Your sister is on line one.”

“Please take a message,” I said, and hung up again.

I would not talk to her. I would not visit her. She and her husband could move by themselves. I’d let her twist in the wind a lot longer this time.

But even as I was thinking this, I could hear her voice in my mind yet again.
What’s the matter? Truth hurt?

I lit another cigarette, went back to the window.

Once, at a judge’s retirement party, a drunk prosecutor—one I’d opposed in court on several occasions—came up to me at the open bar and told me I was the queen of his hate-fuck fantasies. Even as I stepped away, repelled, his words were like a black-gloved hand between my legs and for months afterward, I replayed them in my mind whenever I needed inspiration with Darren. I’d lie in bed beneath my husband and think of the prosecutor’s hard eyes and whiskey breath and loosened tie, the idea that he both hated and wanted me. The knowledge that he went home and thought of me while bringing himself off: who would believe how intoxicating I found it? I wasn’t that kind of woman.

I left another cigarette scar on the sill, made myself return to my desk, spent the next few hours looking at the contents of my inbox without really taking any of it in. My concentration was shot.

Toward the end of the day, my paralegal came into my office with a sheet of paper.

“Kamin’s office just sent this over,” she said. “It’s an updated witness list for the Nathanson case.”

At first glance, it didn’t look much different from the list we already had. And it wasn’t. Only one witness had been added.

I didn’t recognize the surname Magdalene.

But I knew the first name well.

Nan.

* * *

When I got home, Darren was at the dinner table by himself with a carton of lo mein and a bottle of Tsingtao.

“What’s the story with you and Leda?” he asked before I’d closed the door behind me. “She called half an hour ago. She says you won’t talk to her. She sounded very upset.”

“Good,” I said. “She should be upset.” I hung my coat in the closet and stepped out of my shoes.

“Well, what’s going on? She won’t tell me.”

“I’d really rather not tell you either. It’s private.” Hell would freeze over before I’d repeat what Leda had said to me.

“Fine. You don’t have to tell me, but you should call her back. She was begging me to convince you, Lil. ”

“Begging. Now there’s a trick,” I said, going to the liquor cabinet. “Maybe she’ll heel or fetch for you next.”

My husband looked at me in bewilderment.

I grabbed a bottle of Bacardi and slammed the cabinet shut. “Isn’t that what the two of you are into?”

“What in the name of Christ is the matter with you?”

Darren didn’t get angry very often, but I could suddenly see that he was very angry now. And just as suddenly, I understood I had gone too far.

“Okay,” I said. I took a deep breath, looking away from him. “Listen, I’m sorry. I had a real setback today at work.”

I watched anger struggle with sympathy on his face. “What happened?”

I moved to the table and sat down next to him. “My client’s former assistant—who might have provided invaluable testimony on his behalf if he hadn’t
fired
her last week—showed up on the prosecution’s witness list this afternoon,” I said. “And there’s no telling how much damage she’ll do.”

“That’s not good,” Darren conceded.

“He doesn’t know yet. I asked him to come by tomorrow morning. I want to tell him in person.”

“I’d do the same.”

“But I can’t tell you how I’m dreading it. I mean, it could easily be our undoing.”

Darren put a hand on my shoulder and we sat there a moment. I felt a flash of the old closeness with him.

Then he said, “Listen, Lil. I don’t want to be in the middle of whatever’s going on with you and Leda. Of course you’ll do as you decide. But I can’t help hoping you’ll reach out to her.”

And my sense of connection with him vanished, just like that. I couldn’t help but feel he was taking her side, pleading her case.

But I also couldn’t dwell on that right now. I had to figure out how to tell my client that his former assistant would be testifying against him. I had to find a way to control whatever happened when she took the stand. I had to take her down, and I was going to need his help.

* * *

“Abel,” I said the next morning, when he was seated in my office with his dog at his feet. “I have some bad news.”

He tilted his head, waiting.

“The prosecution sent over an updated list of witnesses,” I went on. “And your former assistant is on it.”

“
Nan
?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“No,” he said. “I can’t believe that.”

“Well,” I said carefully, “they would have been remiss not to question her. Any ex-employee, especially one you recently let go, would be likely to yield something of use.”

He passed a hand over his face. For a moment, I was afraid he might cry.

“Well, but what damage can she really do?” he asked after a long moment. “I’m not denying the misappropriation of funds.”

“It depends on how bitter she is, how vindictive she might be feeling,” I said. “She could testify, for example, that she overheard your conversation with Tom Roscoe, and that letting the city underwrite your sister’s repairs was your idea, not his. Is she angry enough to lie on the stand? Because Roscoe will certainly say the idea was yours, and if she were disputing that, her name wouldn’t be on their witness list.”

I paused to let this sink in.

“Beyond that,” I went on, “she could also testify as a character witness. She could tell the jury you’re a greedy, lying, conniving bastard.”

“Jesus Christ,” he said. “Let me contact her.”

“No,” I told him. “You can’t. She’s with them now. They might be recording all her calls, anticipating a conversation like the one you want to have with her. At the very least, we have to assume she would testify about such a phone call. Any appearance on your part of trying to sway her testimony would be catastrophic.”