How is the glass empty already? Should she? She hates to drink on Sundays-she's always thought it a bad sign. But as long as Errol is gone she's made up her mind to do what is necessary. Claire lifts her empty glass and gives the Greek a little wave with it.
"Ruth, thank you for coming-" she begins, then stops herself, feeling pathetic that she beeped her, obviously to deliver some well-planned speech. But her strategy and poise have evaporated in the bar light. "Can you tell me what he has done with his-?"
"Life?" Ruth fills in with a snort, picking at her frilly-frumpy white shirt, then shrugs and delivers one of Nathan's own expressions of helpless wonder, like a kid sister who will despise what she's learned but use it anyway. Her mimicry is so obvious, Claire turns away, embarrassed for her. So this is what Nathan's been doing. Though he and Ruth couldn't be sleeping together. First of all, she's stuck around, or he's let her. And then there's the matter of his little habit, his geographical devotions. Ruth, obviously, is disqualified. It is her compact heaviness, her hushed, mannered way-a little shrug, her sudden silences-of punishing with her disapproval.
"I hear you're well," Ruth says. "I always liked Legal Aid myself-"
But Claire politely waves the subject away. She knows well the patronizing compliments that come next. Though by now her work is like any other, unheroic and time-consuming. It all seems a conspiracy to reward her for her inertia. "I took a case from him today.
"Did you," Ruth says, as if she'd already known. And she has, Claire is sure. Ruth and her spy's clubby demeanor, her transparent smile. Homely, so plain, so oppressively plain as to make her invisible. She was built for surveillance.
"Gross negligence." Claire is fuming. "He just abandoned another client. How does he keep it up? How do you keep it up, working for him?"
"Not for him," Ruth insists. "Just when he needs some help and I have the time. And Nathan has always treated me well."
"He always did."
"He pays me too much."
"I'm sure." Claire smiles with recognition. Those tips he always left. Waiters and cabbies and the Chinese delivery boys in the dead of night, making a bargain of their affection. As at a store's liquidation, buying up whatever was on sale just because he could, treating his merchandise better than he treated his actual human beings.
Claire lifts her fingers, offering the thick air a cigarette. Still, though, Nathan did always foot the whole rent, pay for the movie, and the midnight waiters at Gambone's, the zuppa di giorno, the baskets and baskets of bread, the espressos, gaining weight before her very eyes. Even then he sat there, overweight, a mobster-in-training, with the vest and the pocket watch and his stomach swelling through the suspenders. Fat wads of cash, though it was mostly twenties wrapped in a hundred or two, all of it for show, while his lawyering was bringing in nickels and dimes. Always just a baby step ahead of the collection agencies. The details of life, the bills and RSVPs and grocery lists, bored him. It was the grandiose that lured him. He was operatic. He performed when the lights were on. He lived on praise. He lived-brilliantly, she always thought-on credit, on air.
"So why don't you just call him?" Ruth asks.
"Who says I didn't? You can't reach him. And when you do, he won't call back. He never called back."
Ruth tips her head. "That's true."
Claire permits herself a laugh, letting down her guard for Ruth though she never felt it go up. She pats her old law school-mate's pudgy fingers. "Why should that have changed?"
A pained look crosses Ruth's face. "He needs to see people now."
"He needs," Claire repeats, trying it out on her tongue. It tastes like a joke. Nathan needs. "What for?"
But Ruth is into the bar mix, rummaging around for something, a missing ingredient. "His friends-"
"I'm not-don't call me that. His friend. Does he even mention me?"
The hitch in Ruth's voice says no, though Ruth says, "Here and there."
Here and there. Claire watches the speech she prepared shredding, spinning like confetti in her drink. So unthreatening, so respectable, Ruth is the perfect front, the perfect accomplice. A woman who asks nothing. She's always had that mind like a steel trap. No wonder Nathan likes her around.
"We've all been friends a long time," Ruth says. Claire raises an eyebrow. "Have we?"
"I can't speak for him."
"You mean you won't. You know what he does. You can probably put him away all by yourself." An irresistible thought comes to her: "Maybe that's just what you're doing."
Ruth sighs, weary. "I don't know what you're talking about.
Do you?"
"I don't need to. There was always something. I knew when Milton took him in that it was the end. He was all right on his own. He would have made a hell of a lawyer."
He is."
Claire looks up sharply.
"In his way," Ruth suggests. "But it's true, too, that you don't see everything he does. He has his pro bono cases, like everyone else. You know that in his heart he is a saint."
"We're all saints in our own hearts," Claire replies.
She lifts her head, suddenly, at a sound. Across the river, above the South Street Seaport and the cluster of tall ships the city keeps chained to the docks, balloons of lavender smoke drift like thoughts toward open water. Fireworks, celebrating-she can't imagine what. The overcast a flashing riot, the skyscrapers half disappeared up in the clouds like splintered amputations. The city seems under attack. Downriver, the triple-decker ferry drifts away from its mooring, hunched low and dark like a refugee ship escaping to the safer ground of Staten Island.
They watch a minute in silence.
"Tell me, does he even know he had a son?" Claire asks, realizing, perhaps, the true reason she called Ruth.
Ruth turns her head. "Benny?"
"Benny?"
"But Benny's not his. He couldn't be-"
Across the water, overhead, sail the little gray parachutes of clouds from the fireworks.
"-Nathan's son."
“Of course not." Claire looks at Ruth, unconsciously watching her, the frilly bow at the neck, the brown bob circling her ears, the piercing black eyes. To read her face you'd need a map. "God, you can be beautiful. What a fool Nathan is."
Ruth isn't even blushing. "You have a child? You and-"
"But of course you knew."
Ruth says nothing.
"You knew I was pregnant, Ruth. I know you. You understand everything, you have all the information. You hoard information. And you don't give out a thing. That leaves you in charge. You pull the strings. I like that. I respect that in a woman."
Ruth gives no reaction, betraying nothing.
"So you knew," Claire continues on. "Though not many did. I’m not sure anyone did. I didn't even tell my parents."
“Baptists, I remember."
“They don't want to know. And I hid it well, then took that leave. Though anyone who cared to know could have seen-"
She looks at Ruth, amazed. "Isn't it extraordinary, how much is right in front of us, how truth is right there, and we don't see it, won't see it, despite ourselves, just because we don't want to? We look right tbrougb it. How powerful we are, Ruth. How utterly, utterly magical."
Ruth is saying nothing. Her eyes are casting about for something to grab on to, something safe, something cleaner. Which surprises Claire. This is just the kind of scene Ruth specializes in: barriers breaking, soft spots exposed, vulnerabilities, and Ruth coming in to sweep up, collect information, and clean, clean, clean.
Claire, watching herself in the mirror, is reduced before her own eyes to the status of her own-and only-witness. Her testimony, flawed, raw, sentimental, will have to be revised to do anybody-even herself-any good.
How lonely we are, she thinks.