A Southern Girl (51 page)

“I can’t imagine that kind of law practice,” I tell her. “You come in when you’re in your mid-twenties and they assign you to some antitrust case that began when Christ was a corporal and you work on it for dozens of hours a week and the next thing you know you’re pushing forty and the case is still rolling along, unresolved. I’m exaggerating but there’s an element of truth in it. It’s not unlike Charleston on a grand scale; negotiations turn serious when, and only when, both sides finally start running out of money.”

Natalie looks at me from over the rim of her Manhattan. “You sound jaded.”

I lower my eyes to the candle between us. “I guess I am. What about you? Wall Street is full of Columbia grads. Were you tempted?”

She shakes her head. “That antitrust case you spoke of sounds like a death sentence. I wanted to represent real people. My politics are pretty liberal, so during Reagan’s second term I found my sensibilities continually outraged by his disregard for the have not’s. He pushed me toward the ACLU.”

“Ron’s pretty popular around here,” I note with a chuckle. A group of Floridians, unmistakable in their florid shirts and premature shorts, descend on the table next to us. They shout out drink orders, drowning out normal conversation.

“Do you think the jury might be back?” she asks.

“Not a chance,” I say, sounding dangerously close to authoritarian and mildly chagrined that she is steering us back to business.

“Oh?” she says, grinning. “I’ll bet you dinner they’re back. If I win, you buy and I choose.” She hesitates, suddenly vulnerable as her sophistication slips. “I don’t necessarily mean tonight,” she explains. “You must have plans.”

“Fair enough,” I say, “but from all reports you ACLUers don’t make much money. I promise I’ll select something that won’t threaten your Visa limit.”

“Well,” she says rising, “I’m taking no prisoners. I told you I like long shots and when they come in I collect. Be forewarned.”

We retrace our route toward the courthouse. She asks to hear my theory of why Swilling will prevail.

“He got off on the criminal charges,” I say.

“Perhaps he’s innocent,” she says, not looking at me.

“Right. He’s been to four juries on felony drug charges and he’s only nineteen. Expensive lawyers, intimidation of witnesses, and matchless luck are the only things separating him from long-term care in the penitentiary. If this jury knew how much of this city’s drug problem he’s personally responsible for they’d string him up. But, of course, they aren’t allowed to hear that. To them, he looks like a clean-cut kid after his lawyers burn his pimp outfits and drag him through Brooks Brothers.”

“We’ll know soon,” she says as we round the corner of State and head west on Broad.

The courthouse is dark but for the usual security lights. In the reserved parking spaces abutting the building I see a large, balding man about to duck into his car. “Willie!” I call out. He pauses and stares. “It’s me, Coleman. Did Lydia send them home for the night?”

“Hey, Coleman,” he answers, one leg inside the car and the door half closed. “She sent them home for good. Verdict for the city.”

Natalie’s elbow is in my side before I can utter, “You’re not serious.”

“City Hall is ecstatic,” he calls. “The joke is they’re taking the ‘for sale’ sign off the building.”

I drift toward him in shock, Natalie following. “You’re serious.”

He swings his stored leg from the car and sits facing me. “Serious as a little ole’ heart attack. Brandon interviewed the jury foreman before she left. Two of the black women are heavy duty Baptists and Swilling calling those officers mf’ers nailed him. They didn’t believe a word he said. Excuse me, but I gotta go. I’m late for dinner.”

“Go figure,” I say, turning back to Natalie as Willie cranks his car.

“French,” she says. “Some ambiance, a fabulous wine list. The kind of place where listing entre prices is considered gauche.”

“I can’t believe it.”

“Did I mention Paris?” she is saying. “Our bet said nothing about being restricted to Charleston.”

“Arliene’s is French,” I say lamely. “Three blocks down.”

“Perfect,” she says. “Did I tell you I’ve been in treatment for a rare bulimia involving a compulsive hunger for truffles?”

“Are you enjoying this?”

“I’m about to. You’re sure tonight suits?”

“Let’s eat.”

30

Arliene’s, hole-in-the-wall gourmet, features twelve tables precisely set with starched white tablecloths, linen napkins, and heavy cutlery. By artful subterfuge of plants, columns, and lighting, it is easy to lull into
the illusion that one table, your table, is the sun of this cozy universe, around which planetary waiters, busboys, and chefs hover in measured orbit. Muted strains of Puccini or Verdi, played so softly as to be virtually unheard until a tenor or soprano climbs the upper registers, accompany escargot and pate as fine as I’ve tasted anywhere.

Within minutes of being seated, my sting of defeat begins to wane. Between us, a single fresh-cut Cherokee Rose blooms in its unadorned vase, its yellow stamens encircled by petals of resurrection white so that in color it compliments the lone candle, in which the same yellow fires the wick and rises into an aureole of white flame, the flower the perfect living embodiment of the candle.

We begin this fete with Russian caviar and a champagne toast to my sure-footed instincts about juries. She accepts my sword with the grace of a kindly conqueror wise enough to leave the vanquished a mule and some land. By the time the waiter uncorks a St Martin Merlot, I have begun to relish losing.

As we await entrees, the fragmentary silica of Natalie’s mosaic come together in a pattern of benevolent neglect at the hands of parents well-meaning but insensitive. At fourteen they sent her to boarding school, a female academy in Connecticut magnetic in its attraction of girls with learning and eating disorders. She hated it. After a year and a half, they let her come home, although not to the one she left but a new university town where her father taught on sabbatical. I learn that her reference to bulimia was uttered out of the reservoir of confidence that beating it had replenished. While her mother had urged “fresh air and sunshine” as a prescription for her internal convulsion, she put herself in therapy. A year later she emerged, behind in school but more or less intact emotionally. She modestly described the effort required to make up lost credits, the school at which she spent her senior year being her fourth in four years. She saw its principal “two or three times” prior to the afternoon he awarded her diploma.

“A couple of years after the divorce,” she says, tossing her hair with a turn of her head, “Mother confided that they had stayed together for me. It was my sad duty to tell her I didn’t believe it, that staying married for the sake of a child implied affection for the child and I had felt very little from either of them. She blamed my dad, of course, and in a way she was right. He’s a theoretician, one of those academics compelled to logic even when
the results are absurd. He has a fine mind—so does my mother—but he never grasped the difference between thought and feeling.”

“And your mother?”

“Warmer than dad but even more demanding where I was concerned. If I shined it was expected, if I screwed up it was the beginning of the end. Dad’s aloofness drove her crazy and she was always shouting that he had no appreciation for her needs, which was true, but instead of accepting him as the cold, brainy fish he is she was determined to bring him around. A tragic match. If they stayed together for me it was to argue about who knew best and not out of fear of damaging me. How did we get into all this?”

“I asked,” I remind her. “What about men? Any better luck?”

“Late in my last year at Columbia I moved in with the editor of the law review.”

“Lucky guy,” I say.

“Thank you. I thought so. I stayed with him for six months, although with both of us studying for the bar and working unconscious hours I probably saw him the equivalent of three weeks.”

She pauses, treading the edge of an additional thought, a half-smile coming to her lips as she debates.

“Spit it out,” I say.

“I find it hard to believe I’m sharing all this, and harder to believe you’re interested. Anyway, one day I brought home a puppy. He was most upset. I pointed out that I was there, alone, more often than he was and that I would be completely responsible for it. The following day he presented me with sixteen reasons—I am not exaggerating—sixteen written reasons why a puppy was not practical in Manhattan.”

“So you broke up with him.”

“So I recognized my father. Isn’t that strange? All those years trying to rationalize the distance my father held me at and I go for a man exactly like him.”

“Happens a lot,” I add.

“I suppose. Anyway, I left that afternoon and never went back. And that’s the end of my story. Thanks for being an expert listener.”

Her crab meat au gratin, my steak in a delicate peppercorn dressing arrive. The conversation turns to the presidential primaries, to the inevitability of Bill Clinton’s reelection.

“So Jimmy Carter didn’t sour you on southern governors?” I want to know as my knife slices through my tenderloin like a scalpel through custard.

“Carter is a better man than he was a president,” she says. “Clinton is probably the reverse, but Dole? Tell me about meeting your wife, unless she’s someone you’d rather not discuss.”

“It’s okay,” I assure. I tell her of the freshman blind date, the long night guarding the campus. “You would have loved it. Couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting a radical.” She smiles often, asking questions occasionally and enjoying her dinner. Around us, voices intimate and subdued mingle among the wind-chime murmuring of silver against china, mostly unseen from our secluded spot.

“Can I be honest with you about something personal?” she asks.

“Fire away.”

“You don’t seem like the kind of man who would adopt an Asian orphan.”

“You mean I obviously lack the warmth, the sensitivity, the compassion to reach out the way you liberals do for trees and snail-darters and spotted owls.”

“I didn’t mean that.”

“Sure you did.”

“No,” she says earnestly. “I meant only that you seem … traditional, and it strikes me as a non-traditional act.”

I bring my napkin to my mouth before responding. “Regrettably, you are right for the second time in an hour.”

“At least this time it won’t cost you,” she says.

“You never know. It means you’ve figured me out. The adoption was Elizabeth’s idea. She planned it, she pushed it, she made it happen.”

“But you agreed to it.”

“I didn’t object may be a more accurate way of putting it. At first I thought it was just a sudden inspiration that would pass. She could be like that. Later, when I saw how determined she was, I was against it because I knew the friction it would cause in my family.”

“Did it?”

“My father stopped speaking to me. Mother called me spineless for not standing up to Elizabeth. I tried to call it off, to convince Elizabeth that
it wasn’t worth the pain it was going to inflict. She insisted they’d get over it. So there I was, caught in the crossfire of those I loved and all the exits blocked.”

Natalie reaches for her butter knife and with it makes a swirl on the bread she is coating. “I watched you as she rode in the Cup; whatever misgivings you may have had died out a long time ago.”

“You’re batting a thousand,” I concede. “But it took her arrival to dispel them. Right up until they put her in Elizabeth’s arms I was sure it was a mistake.”

“She came by air, of course.”

I nod, smiling involuntarily in remembrance. I relate Allie’s arrival. “What a fabulous day,” she says. “Aren’t you glad you trusted Elizabeth’s instincts?”

“Very glad.”

“Perhaps you should trust mine when it comes to the St. Simeon.”

“I’ve listened. You want me to sue my friends, foul my own nest and Allie’s too.”

She stares at me a moment, then lowers her eyes and says softly, “No, I don’t.”

“But from the day you walked into my office—”

“I’ve changed my mind.”

“What! I didn’t think they let you do that in the ACLU. Couldn’t this jeopardize your pension?”