Solomon & Lord Drop Anchor (32 page)

“Exactly! You were striking out at me because
of the gazebo. You thought I was belittling the amount of money you
make in comparison to Harold, so you brought up the children to
hurt me, to remind me that I’m defective, that I’m not a whole
woman.”

“No! I swear—”

“It’s your fault as much as mine,” he fired
back. “You’re the bastard who knocked me up back on the
island.”

The ferocity of her words startled him, and
he backed off, retreating to the bed. His head throbbed. Their
arguments were becoming more severe, Connie’s attacks more
cutting.

“Connie, what can I say to you? You’re not
defective. You’re a bright, witty, breathtaking woman, and I don’t
care how much money Harold makes. I don’t care if he moves the
Smithsonian into his gazebo and invites the Washington Redskins to
play in his backyard. So let’s just forget it.”

In the mirror, he saw her eyes brim with
tears. There would be no more playful banter today. She had brought
back the memories, which hung over them like the stalled
thunderhead of a summer storm. At the time, Connie was just
finishing her master’s degree, still writing her thesis on French
impressionism. They’d just starting going out, and one August
night, after a swim in the cold Atlantic at dusk off Siasconset on
Nantucket Island, wrapped in a blanket on the beach, they’d made
love. He remembered even now her salty taste, her long wet hair
falling into her face, his body grinding into her with the urgency
and passion of new lovers.

My God, the heat we brought to each
other.

He could still picture the fusion of their
bodies, each of them heedless of the scraping sand and incoming
tide, seeing only the first stars of evening, the rising moon, and
the fire in each other’s eyes. What he wouldn’t give to re-create
that with her now. For longer than he cared to admit, their
lovemaking had been infrequent and perfunctory.

But then … oh Lord, then the sex had been
synchronized with the pounding of the waves. He had sung out her
name on the sea breeze, exploding into her with a thunderclap from
within, watching bolts of lightning through closed eyes.

He had also exploded into her without
protection, an event that just now prompted Connie to refer to her
husband not as “Sweetheart” but rather as “the bastard who knocked
me up back on the island.” Actually, he 
had
 used a
condom, but it burst because, in his feverish haste, he had
neglected to squeeze out the air pocket in the tip, which then
detonated in the midst of their furious coupling. Sam Truitt’s
manual dexterity, it seemed, was limited to putting a spiral on the
long snap.

Connie became pregnant. Their first crisis,
the one that would launch all the others. Just like the chaos
theory the physicists introduced to popular culture. The flap of a
butterfly’s wings in Brazil can cause a typhoon in the Pacific.
And, he supposed, the explosion of a condom on Nantucket can cause
an October freeze in Georgetown fifteen years later.

At the time, they handled the situation
surprisingly well. He was sensitive, caring, understanding. She was
thoughtful, mature, and decisive.

He said it was her choice all the way. He
believed, then as a man, and now as a judge, that the woman had all
the votes. There was no talk of marriage. After all, they barely
knew each other. But if she chose to have the child, he promised to
be there for them both. He’d visit, bring birthday presents, pay
for everything right up through college. He gave himself an A for
his hypothetical parenting skills, which she reminded him, were
considerably greater than his actual contraception skills.

The abortion was quick and apparently without
incident. Well, not without psychological incident. Connie became
depressed. He felt guilty. He’d never heard the term back then, but
now he supposed they were snared in a codependent relationship. He
wouldn’t leave her, not like that. He was captured in the web of
her moodiness, sinking in the quicksand of her unfulfilled
needs.

They were married six months later, and the
artificiality of the closeness that carried them through the
abortion soon evaporated. For reasons neither they nor the doctors
could understand, this healthy, athletic, screw-every-damn-night
couple could not conceive. Several years later they learned that
the abortion had caused an infection, which scarred her Fallopian
tubes.

Complicating their lives, hanging over them
like an unseen ghost, was the child they never had. They did not
even create an illusion, a fantasy child to sustain them like the
playwright Albee’s ineffectual George and vicious Martha, locked in
a perpetual embrace of psychological cruelty. Their life together
had begun with the act of conceiving an unwanted child on the shore
of an ocean, and in what Sam’s Southern Baptist relatives would
have considered an act of biblical retribution, they cried a sea of
tears trying to duplicate the feat.

“Do you know what really angers me?” she
asked, finally.

Everything
, he thought.

“The fact that you don’t see the connection
between your words and the source of your feelings,” she answered
herself.

He had to get out of there. The bedroom was
growing smaller by the minute. He stood and tried to escape,
squeezing between his wife and the bed, banging his shin into an
open vanity drawer.

“Damn! 
Plessy versus Ferguson!
”
When he was angry, Truitt tried to confine his profanity to the
names of horrific Supreme Court decisions. Sopchoppy responded with
a quiet 
woof
.

“I told you this house was too small,” she
said as he fled, hopping on one foot.

The Truitts’ two-hundred-year-old farmhouse
near Waltham was ten times larger, Connie frequently reminded him.
They had eighteen gently rolling acres with a stream on one side of
the property and a duck pond on the other. But Connie was unhappy
there, too, always complaining that the house was too big, too
drafty, too old, too far from Boston.

Washington was going to be their move to the
city. Embassy parties, dinner at Citronelle, shopping for
antiques.

Sam Truitt cared nothing for black tie
dinners or sautéed foie gras with poached figs in port wine sauce.
His tastes were simpler, preferring cut-off jeans and a meal of
plain grilled snapper and boiled swamp cabbage, a legacy of growing
up in Everglades City. It took him thirty years to find out that
his momma’s swamp cabbage was called heart of palm when served in
fancy restaurants, including The Palm, and an appetizer portion
could set you back eight bucks. He used to eat about a pound of the
concoction for supper. His mother, a Florida Cracker, would slice
open a palm tree with a machete and cook the fibrous meat with
sow’s belly or ham hock in a fifty-five-gallon drum on an open
fire. They’d eat, year-round, at a picnic table under a live oak
tree, zebra butterflies flapping over their heads, causing typhoons
in Tonga, he now supposed.

Washington was also going to rejuvenate the
marriage, and who knows, maybe lead to a magical fertility that had
escaped them farther north. So far, all it had accomplished was to
bring them into closer confinement.

Two scorpions in a shoe box.

He preferred the open spaces of the wetlands
where he grew up. Connie insisted on referring to the Everglades as
“the swamp,” despite his insistence that it was really a
slow-moving freshwater river some sixty miles wide. Just after his
nomination to the Court last spring, he returned to Florida for
“Sam Truitt” day, which the local weekly termed the largest
celebration the town had ever seen, if you didn’t count the annual
seafood festival. The volunteer fire department led a parade, with
the high school band playing off-key Sousa. A chugging John Deere
tractor hauled Sam and Connie down Conch Avenue on a float with
papier-mâché pillars representing the Supreme Court, Connie choking
on the diesel fumes that hung in the humid air.

In the sweltering Fishermen’s Hall, Truitt
made a speech, tracing his success to values learned in the sloughs
and creeks of the Ten Thousand Islands, and Connie stood there in a
yellow sundress, fanning herself with a commemorative poster,
complaining about the heat, picking over the supper of fried
catfish, hush puppies, and key lime pie—washed down with
sugar-laden iced tea. Later, manhandling bottles of tequila, Truitt
and some of the good ole boys, now leathery fishermen with scarred
hands and squinty eyes, swapped lies about their youth and who
built the fastest airboat from broken airplane propellers and old
Chevy engines.

Truitt hadn’t been home since his mother’s
funeral eight years earlier. His father had died three years before
that. This time, as he clasped hands and slapped shoulders of old
friends and acquaintances, he kept an eye on Connie, studying her
discomfort. While he felt at home, she looked afraid of stepping in
something squishy and repulsive.

That night in their motel room, as they
settled onto opposite sides of the lumpy bed, Connie said, “I
didn’t know I’d married Huck Finn.”

“Yes you did,” he replied.

Sam Truitt knew that Connie would have been
happier married to a real estate developer who made millions
building condos in protected wetlands, or an investment banker who
knew the value of the deutsche mark when the markets opened each
day—anyone whose net worth equaled her appetite for
consumption.

To Truitt, status was achieved by deeds, not
dollars. His love of the law was paramount over building a net
worth. It also took priority over personal relations, something he
acknowledged as a flaw in his character. When they first moved to
Washington, he realized that he was more concerned about the needs
of migrant workers than those of his newly migrated wife.

He accepted the fact that Connie grew less
affectionate each year. Hell, he deserved it. Sam Truitt was, after
all, a man who had difficulty expressing his emotions, much less
fulfilling the emotional needs of another person. Who could blame
Connie if she longed for a man who would pamper his wife instead of
illegal aliens?

So Sam Truitt understood half a dozen years
earlier when she had her first affair, with the tennis pro at the
club, of all the mundane clichés. He responded with an affair of
his own, an adoring law student, in violation of university rules
and his own ethics. I’ll see your cliché and raise you another.
They weathered those storms and stayed together.

At first, Connie had seemed happy when he
received the Supreme Court appointment. No more faculty teas with
their dreary gossip washed down by watery punch. Life in Washington
would be different. But she must have been thinking of her father’s
social whirl as a senator, always making the rounds of chic parties
and Georgetown dinners. She was not prepared for the more monastic
life of a Supreme Court justice. Boredom set in quickly. After not
having worked for years, Connie began an interior decorating
business. Now, her fondest hope was for the defeat of the
Democratic president in the next election, both to punish him for
appointing her husband, and to bring wealthy Republicans to town
with an insatiable desire to redecorate.

His shin still throbbing, a truce having been
declared by his retreat from the bedroom, Truitt was sitting at the
small desk in the study when he heard Connie’s voice. “Did you hire
the third law clerk, Sam?”

“Yes,” he called back, as he thumbed through
the briefs for the first oral argument of the new term. “She’s a
real winner. Lisa Premont.”

“Tell me about her.” Connie was moving around
in the bedroom. They were talking to each other now separated by
the landing at the top of the stairs—and years of missed
connections.

“She’s from the West Coast. Berkeley,
Stanford, then a year clerking on the D.C. circuit.”

“A California beach bunny?”

“She’s a fisherman’s daughter and smart as
hell.”

“I’ll bet she’s pretty.”

He could lie, of course. “She looks like
Howard Stern in drag.”

But the first time Connie had the clerks over
for dinner, she’d brain him with a lamb chop. “As a matter of fact,
she’s quite attractive,” he said.

“I thought you had a bounce in your step when
you came home today.”

“I had to pee.”

She walked into his study from the master
bedroom. She was wearing a sleeveless black silk cocktail dress, a
triple strand of pearls, and matching earrings.

“My God, you’re beautiful,” he said.

“Look at you!” she cried. “You’re not
ready.”

“Ready for what?” he asked, even though it
occurred to him that she was dressed for a party while he was
wearing a twenty-year-old Wake Forest sweatshirt with holes in both
Ds of Demon Deacons.

“The reception at the Watergate. It starts at
seven. Hurry up. I’ll find your tux.”

“What reception?”

“The benefit! The one Stephanie and Harold
invited us to, bought our tickets, a thousand dollars each.”

“Not the one sponsored by the National
Association of Manufacturers,” he said, vaguely recalling having
told his brother-in-law thanks but no thanks.

“Who cares who’s sponsoring? It’s for the
hospital. It’s nonpolitical, nonsectarian, nonoffensive even to a
holier-than-thou associate justice on the Supreme fucking
Court.”

“I told Harold we couldn’t go,” he said
guiltily, realizing he’d forgotten to tell Connie.

“What! Why?”

“NAM is amicus curiae in a major case on
punitive damages, and they’re involved in another half dozen cases
with cert petitions pending. Besides, I can’t accept a gift from a
lobbyist.”

“You must be kidding. Do you think you’ll be
compromised by eating their goat cheese on endive?”

“No, but my attendance makes it appear they
have access to the Court.”