We All Sleep in the Same Room (2 page)

“She told you this?” Raina says.

“Yeah. It's bizarre. Essentially she claims to have earned an on-the-job, extrasensory medical degree. She described the gait of the alcoholic, the fidgeting of a crack addict, the schizophrenic's shifting stare. But most prominent, she said, is the abuse victim. She says she sees them everywhere, on the subway, walking down the street, and that they haunt her daily.”

“Whoa,” Raina says.

“I know,” I say, shifting in my seat. “So, while we have no documentation from the clinic yet, Doreen is convinced that the complaint against her came from a woman named Olga Petrova, someone Doreen grew up with in Jackson Heights. Olga came in one day looking to see a physician. The two of them hadn't seen each other since childhood, but Doreen recognized Olga immediately and took it upon herself to try to help her old friend be seen as soon as possible. And get this: she said she could tell right away that Olga was a victim of abuse.”

“What did she do?” Raina asks, “Doreen—did she say something to her?”

“Apparently she was only sympathetic. She said she knew better than to confront her about it, but I guess she got pretty frustrated when she couldn't help get Olga immediate attention, and she told Olga as much. When Doreen came in the following Monday, she was told she'd violated a patient's rights, that she'd breached confidentiality and used threatening and hostile language that profoundly upset the patient. And she was terminated.”

* * *

The impassioned noise of
my son's protests sputter angrily against a stream of his sobs. Dumbo and his mother are already reunited, and the train sailed off into the sunset. The End. Raina is once again holding Ben, and consequently subduing and quieting him as quickly as he starts. She tells Ben about his big day tomorrow. She tells him that if he cooperates, he can get two bedtime stories.

“Daddy's going to read to you tonight.”

He gets about halfway to the bathroom and breaks down again.

“You can watch the movie again tomorrow. Now it's time to relax and get ready for bed. How about Daddy reads one story to you, then I read one to you?”

We're perpetually compromising with Ben. It's fitting that the son of a lawyer should already have internalized at the age of three that there is no such thing as an unbreakable rule or an unalterable situation. Thus far his only negotiating strategy is to cry. And it's effective.

“It's okay,” I say. “You guys read tonight. Can I read to you tomorrow night, Ben?” He stares at me blankly. “I'll take that as a yes. I love you.” I walk over and steal a kiss from his wet cheek.

Once Raina and Ben disappear into the bedroom, I turn on the TV. I retrieve my briefcase and lay Doreen's file out on the coffee table. Raina's voice creeps in from the other room as she starts to read. I turn off the overhead light and lie down on the couch.

Other than the news and the occasional Ken Burns PBS special, I haven't watched much TV in years. But, rather than feeling superior to the newer wave of sitcoms and the reality shows, I actually feel quite old and dumb when I watch them. Similar to Ben's relationship with
Dumbo
, there's a dimension to the shows that I don't understand. Yet my curiosity isn't sparked like his. The editing and shaky camerawork feels so distracting that I often lose track of what's at stake. How about making a show where a family all sleeps in the same room so nobody has a sex life? Maybe it's already been done. I switch the TV off.

Suddenly, I'm seeing Doreen seated across my desk, shrinking downward, her thin neck lowering over her already-hunched shoulders. I picture her entrance into my office. First, Robin's voice over the intercom,
A Ms. Grant is here to see you, Tom
. And that sound of footsteps in the corridor that signifies the imminent presence of a brand new other inside my office. And then this woman—deathly pale, bleach blonde, lightly freckled, blue-gray eyes—wearing a dress that seems to belong to a different era.

I picture the vacant expression Doreen must have worn on her walk home from her former job that August morning, not even a half hour after arriving. I don't remember much after that. I felt numb. Nothing made sense. It didn't seem real. She said it wasn't until she returned home and saw her husband, Hunter, asleep in their bed, that she went into her living room and cried. She said she cried for a month, and was despondent for nearly another before contacting the union. Prior to that she'd felt too crushed to do anything.

“Did she have any idea how close she came to exceeding the sixty-day time frame for pursuing grievances in the contract?” Jessie had asked me over coffee. “She wouldn't have had a case at all.”

My apartment is silent. I close my eyes and discover the familiar, muted hum of taxis whirring around Union Square and the cry of ambulances rushing victims to St. Vincent's.

I wonder what Doreen's doing at this moment. Maybe she's alone right now. At home in Coney Island in some shitty flat with cheap furniture.

Raina tiptoes into the living room, sits on the couch and sighs. I listen to her breathe.

She's drowsy, or at least believes she is, and in another minute will start either to vent her frustrations with work or with her mother or with Cal's latest flame, or pass out on my shoulder.

I kiss her.

Then, taking her under her arms, I lean her across the couch. I unbutton her jeans and tug them down her legs, over her ankles. Raina's hands instinctively shield her crotch. Her thighs quiver from the sudden exposure to the air. A few days' hair growth on her legs doesn't faze me anymore.

“Tom,” she says softly. “I'm not…” But she doesn't finish, and I kiss her.

I grasp her wrists, lift her arms over her head and attempt to warm her by covering her with my clothed body. She moans upon impact. I hold her wrists with one of my hands and push my free hand, fingers out, between her legs until she's ready. Then I undress.

I brush her hair back from her face. Her complacency makes me go harder until she starts breathing audibly loud and quick. It's been a while and I feel good. I go faster and harder. When Raina gets too loud, I put my finger gently to her lips. She bites it. She digs her nails into my hips.

“Stop.”

“What?”

“Mommy?”

Ben is standing timorously at the other end of the room, lips pouted, chin over chest, milk-distended belly out against outer space pajamas.

“Ben,” I say.

“Hi, my love,” Raina says.

My reaction is to lie deeper into Raina and wrap my arms around her to conceal myself and show Ben that his parents are hugging. But Raina pushes me off.

She hurries to Ben and picks him up, naked legs and all. “Were you having trouble sleeping?” They disappear into the bedroom.

In the bathroom, I run a cool shower, finish myself off, and brush my teeth. I enter the bedroom as Raina's leaving.

“Ben is going to sleep.”

“Okay,” I say. “Me too.”

I kiss Ben and slide into my bed.

“Is that you, Daddy?”

“Yup.”

“Are you going to sleep now with me?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Is Mommy coming to bed?”

“Soon.”

“I love you, good night.”

“I love you too. Sweet dreams.”

2

I
wake to stripes of gray-blue light that bleed filtered and dulled through the slatted shade by our bed. Raina sleeps on the other side of me, closer to Ben.

It's early, but not so early that it will be long before Ben is up and tugging on Raina's weary body, wanting first to be held, then craving a minute later cartoons and toys, all the while requiring cereal and fresh clothes before nursery school.

To ensure that I have no part in disrupting Raina's rest, I carefully shimmy down the length of our bed, as I often do, and slink past Ben's low-lying, perpendicular bed. Ben, a sizable pool of drool on his pillow, is asleep on his stomach holding Elmo with one arm.

Toys congest the living-room floor. Raina and I make a point to tidy the apartment every Sunday, but by Friday, inevitably, something's getting in my way. Train tracks snake along the carpet. Matchbox cars and a fire engine are parked in front of the couch. I imagine stepping on one of Ben's favorite toys, perhaps splintering the plastic rooftop of the fire engine with my heel. They'd hate me for it.

With my face lathered and white, I bring the razor to my cheek. Doreen's bony, troubled face flickers for a moment in the steamed glass. The razor catches on my skin, just below my jaw. A trickle of red.

* * *

N train to Times
Square: the station is alive, people crossing in every direction at different rhythms. Up ahead, underneath the Lichtenstein mural, a flautist and a bongo player are heads down, playing some kind of jazz. I take a dollar from my wallet and watch the bill's jerky descent into the wicker basket below.

On the street, I stop to watch a small crew lugging half-kegs through the front door of the Times Square Brewery. Two guys smoke cigarettes, dressed in all white—kitchen staff, most likely.

At my desk. The spring-loaded arm of my draftsman lamp has crept, once again, imperceptibly down during the night. I angle it back and watch the circle of yellow light spread like a rising sun across the landscape. Mountains of print, transcripts,
communications, depositions,
and decisions—old and new, finished and unfinished, both loose and bound in a plethora of styles befitting the time and taste of the clerks, lawyers, and secretaries involved—offer a rough representation of my day, my week, my month, my career.

My latest litigation involves Elena Gomez, a public school teacher who was abruptly fired last month when her social security number came back “no match.” This, after six years of employment plus another ten in the private sector.

“It's the number I've always used,” she'd said. “The one my father told me was mine. It's never been a problem. Why now?”

Elena, who was born in the DR and raised in the Bronx, is the ninth separate “no match” case our office has handled in the last year. Sudden pressure from the brute and clumsy hand of our post–9/11 government.

At noon, the office gathers around the long table in the conference room for lunch. On the walls hang framed posters of C
é
sar Chávez, Samuel Gompers, John Steinbeck, Martin Luther King Jr., and Rosie the Riveter. We can do it. I sit at one end with the senior partners and the secretaries, and Jessie and the younger lawyers congregate at the other.

My firm is blessed with some of the sharpest minds and the most idealistic hearts of a generation. Sure, a few years back we lost two Harvard grads to corporate law, the dark side, as we referred to it, but that's always gone on. The atmosphere that remains here is one of empathy, hard work, and a keen and worldly intellect. Today there's a lot of talk of Bush's recent nomination of Judge John Roberts for the Supreme Court. It's disheartening news to an office full of dyed-in-the-wool progressives, but I actually think it makes us dig our heels in and fight harder.

With ample experience behind me and with relative youth by lawyer standards, I have, in all likelihood, entered my professional prime. If this firm were a sports team, I think my partners would agree—assuming they were alright with that metaphor—I'd be captain. According to the firm's revenue earned minus expenses incurred, I'd also be the leading scorer. Forty-six for lawyers may be what twenty-six is to a ball player.

There are three senior partners who've been on the payroll since I joined the firm. They're like elders at a holiday feast. Each aging lefty still retains a nicely furnished office, but since they make an appearance only a few days a week, as breadwinners they've been on the decline for years. It was common knowledge that Bernie Levan, who commuted from the Hamptons, wasn't even breaking even. In a week he was headed south for a little Florida R&R. But for better or worse, they're still buddies with some of our largest clients, having garnered national reputations, and comprise the firm's namesake: Cunningham, Klein, and Levan. No one is in a position to move them out the door, and their presence at holiday parties and client-sponsored conferences involving golf and free dinners, which incidentally, they never seem to miss, is strangely comforting. At least to me it is. My father died my first year away from home so I find solace in three regal, slow-moving men, their slumped shoulders, liver-spotted scalps, and spongy midsections.

I've always had a particular fondness for John Cunningham, a tall, brilliant, dignified seventy-four-year-old born in Manchester, who smokes a pipe against building regulations and doctor's orders and wears argyle sweaters and a Welsh hunting jacket in the fall. He has the classic good looks of a former leading man. He's lived in the Village since the sixties and has a wealth of inspiring, crass tales, which are good for morale.

In part, I like John because I've long suspected that he'd advocated for me when I was hired, just two years out of law school. For unclear reasons, Cunningham seemed to be of the opinion that I was some kind of legal mastermind—an old-school scholar. From the beginning he made a regular point to consult me on legal niceties and nuances that veered toward the philosophical. Also, in those early days, he used to invite me on Friday afternoons to lunch at the Italian restaurant under the Edison Hotel. He'd feed me drinks and expound ideas on esoteric legal matters over spaghetti and clam sauce. Just me and one of the most highly esteemed labor lawyers in Manhattan. When I gave up drinking, I largely gave up Friday lunches with John. I went twice more, and to his credit he didn't act hurt when I declined gin and tonic, but it wasn't the same. I never blamed Raina for this. It was, like I said, my decision. John and I remain friendly. Occasionally he forgets and offers me a cocktail in the late afternoon, so I know he keeps a bottle somewhere in his office.

On this Friday afternoon, John is still out of the office, visiting his forty-year-old son, who not long ago began a third tenure at a rehab clinic in Tucson. I don't hang around and talk after lunch, but take some water back to my office, check my email, and find myself waiting for three o'clock.

* * *

“It's funny,” I say.
“I never thought I'd be a regular at a place like this.”

“Oh yeah?” says Jessie. We're standing in line at Dunkin' Donuts on the corner of Broadway and 45th.

“Well, I used to go to the Starbucks up the street if I wanted an afternoon coffee. But that was only on rare occasions.”

“They got you with the trendy music, huh?”

I grin helplessly.

“I wouldn't take you for the type to support Dunkin' Donuts,” she says. Jessie is a twenty-four-year-old law student we hired on as a part-time legal assistant at the firm last fall. “They don't exactly set a gleaming example for labor relations, do they?”

“Starbucks, Dunkin' Donuts, they all have miserable records when it comes to accepting the right of workers to organize.”

“I guess you're right.”

“It's the uninterrupted trend in the history of big business,” I say. “Truthfully, we shouldn't patronize either, but it's like, look around you—any semblance of a mom and pop operation has long since gone the way of the hardware store and the peep show.” I hand Grace, our regular cashier, six dollars, which gets two medium coffees and a cruller and leaves a twenty percent tip. “And then there's the convention of the tip: a compensatory system I'm also ideologically against, but of course practice, for the reason that I'm not a complete asshole.”

Now she's the one grinning. Fridays are casual at the office and Jessie wears a pinstriped, navy blue dress. It leaves her long neck exposed, the two delicate diagonal tendons alongside the trachea, and a hint of collarbone. I'm in a suit sans tie. We find a table in the back.

“You look overworked,” I say, which is true, although she looks utterly good to me. Jessie has these big wet eyes. Water eyes.

“Yeah. My weekend began prematurely. An old friend's in town.”

“Guy or girl?”

“A guy.” Jessie says. “He's staying with me too.”

“In that tiny apartment in Williamsburg?” I say. I've gripped my cup too forcefully and a small spurt of scalding coffee has overflowed onto my knuckles, though Jessie doesn't seem to notice. I wince in private pain.

“That's where I live,” she says. “Anyway, Tyler's an old friend from home. While I'm happy to see him, it's been a lot having him around when I've got studying and classes in the afternoon and work in the morning. You know how old friends can be.”

I nod and dry my knuckles against my palm.

“I promised him we'd go out in Manhattan tonight. We're going to meet after work and wander toward Chelsea.”

Maybe Jessie's considerate disposition is the byproduct of a solid Midwestern upbringing. Maybe she's just young. Either way, Jessie seems to possess an uncanny ability to say or do precisely what people want, when she wants to.

“It'll be funny being a tour guide after being here just a short while,” Jessie muses, “but by my very first visit home, everyone had already dubbed me a New Yorker.”

Jessie's from an old farming town in Nebraska. In college, she was a classics major as well as a cyclist, the latter being a topic I haven't probed too deeply but have a natural admiration for. I used to be a runner.

“I know what you mean,” I say. “I've lived here my whole life and it still feels odd to show other people where I live. It's as though when they ask for a tour or to be shown a good time, they're implicitly asking,
so what makes your life here so special?
”

I put my hand on my neck to scratch an itch and feel the cut from my earlier shaving mishap.

“Do you want to get a drink?” I say.

“Now?” she says. “We're drinking coffee.”

“Right, I don't mean this instant. I walk by that brewery on 42nd every day. I've been meaning to try it. Plus, you and I have never had a drink together. I mean a real drink.”

“I thought you didn't do that.”

“Didn't do what? Drink? I don't—or I didn't. I can though.”

She looks at me quizzically.

“I wanted to talk about the Allied Health Employees case. I'm meeting with the receptionist, Doreen, next week before I draft up my settlement proposal. If the clinic doesn't bite I want to get the arbitration on track as soon as possible. There's no reason to drag this thing out.”

She appears on the verge of speaking but then hesitates. I have a golden opportunity to rescind my offer with a simple excuse, offending no one and swiftly righting the situation. All memory of the invitation for drinks could soon be largely forgotten and—

“Alright,” she says.

“Alright what?”

“Alright, I want that drink. But I need to finish organizing some trial exhibits for Margaret back at the office. Then I'll come find you.”

* * *

I drum my desk
with my fingers. Still no word back from the Coney Island Health Clinic. It's been over a week since I'd faxed them a letter requesting a copy of any report produced from their investigation into Doreen's alleged misconduct. It was standard practice for an employer to turn it over.

Doreen was born in Jackson Heights and never lived outside of Queens. It was in Queens that she became passionate about working at health clinics. It was also in Queens that she started to memorize the conditions of all the patients. The promotion to billing and records gave her unlimited access to everyone's charts.

She had an ex-husband in Jackson Heights who worked up the street at an auto body shop. On the surface, it didn't seem relevant. But she claimed he was the reason she left her first job and moved to Coney Island. Once she remarried, she didn't like knowing her ex-husband was so close.

And then there was Olga: the miraculous reappearance of a childhood friend. Seeing Olga's bruised condition had devastated Doreen. If Olga had been mistreated—and Doreen was certain that this was the case—then her injuries demanded immediate attention. According to Doreen, Dr. Kaplan, the head physician at the clinic, hadn't agreed. This enraged her.

Raina was expecting me to arrive home on the early side tonight. Next to the computer monitor is a photograph of Raina in her late twenties, posing by a willow tree in the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. Next to that is a picture I took last Thanksgiving of Raina cradling Ben, flanked by my mother and sister. I take the phone from the receiver and then set it back down. I pick up the phone again and dial Raina.

* * *

It's 4:30
p.m.
and
I'm roaming the hallways. What should I drink tonight? Whiskey? No. I should go easy. I head to the small office kitchen and fill a cup of water from the cooler. As I turn around I find myself face-to-face with Margaret, the firm's newest straight-to-partner ace.

“Just the man I'm looking for.” Margaret says. Margaret is a seasoned Winnipeg transplant that the firm picked up just two falls ago. Her mid-life decision to trade in her quaint-but-respectable government job in Manitoba for a Times Square office and a high-rise flat with her girlfriend on the Upper East Side had been our serendipitous good fortune. “The partners are dining at Molvydos after work with the intention of talking shop, most notably what our Christmas bonuses are looking like for this year.”