Now, four months later, miles and miles from shore again, she sat handcuffed to the bulkhead of another boat and felt the first pangs of a gnawing desire she knew would devour her completely in the days and nights to come.
I kept thinking of Annie Hall, where there’s a split screen and Woody Allen is talking to his psychiatrist while Diane Keaton is talking to hers and the psychiatrists are both asking the same question, “How often do you have sex?” and he answers “Hardly ever,” and she answers “All the time!” Or words to that effect, it was an old movie.
Patricia wanted to know what I’d meant by my remark about God.
“I was making a joke. We didn’t really talk about sex.”
“What did you talk about?”
“He wanted to know how I’d like my steak done.”
Patricia ignored this.
“It seems to me,” she said, “that raising the topic of sex in Susan’s presence was tantamount to leading a witness.”
“I didn’t raise the topic. Andrea Lang did.”
“You were the one who first mentioned sex.”
“Andrea Lang was the one who asked if people in coma thought about sex.”
“Chain of custody,” Patricia said. “Tinkers to Evers to Chance. An opening that allowed Susan to testify as an expert. And what’s with you and the Cross-Eyed Cooze?”
“She’s a client,” I said. “You know that. Talking about her is out of bounds.”
The professional arrangement Patricia and I have made — as opposed to our personal arrangement, such as it’s been since my recovery, but who’s griping? — is that we simply do not discuss any criminal case I’m working, this to avoid even the slightest appearance of impropriety between the law firm of Summerville and Hope and the State Attorney’s Office. Since Patricia is one of the brightest stars on the prosecution team headed by Skye Bannister — the unfortunate name with which our eminent state attorney was anointed — and since my office handles a great many noncriminal legal matters, we normally have plenty to talk about when it comes to sharing shoptalk.
But this wasn’t shoptalk tonight.
“She really should stop wearing her skirts so short, by the way.”
“Lainie?”
“Susan. And she should also stop using your goddamn name.”
“It’s her goddamn name, too.”
“Doesn’t she have a maiden name?”
“Not anymore. She hasn’t been a maiden for many moons now.”
“Didn’t she once have a maiden name?”
“Yes, Susan Fitch,” I said.
“So why doesn’t she go back to it? Why does she have to keep clinging to you?”
“I wasn’t aware that she was clinging to me.”
“She came to the hospital every goddamn day.”
“I wasn’t aware of that.”
“Even after you woke up. Especially after you woke up. So tonight you give her an opening she could drive a locomotive through.”
“Andrea gave her the opening.”
“You were the one who started it. I’m surprised she didn’t just unzip your fly.”
“Andrea? She hardly knows me.”
“Or maybe you’d have enjoyed that.”
“Would’ve given me something to tell God about, anyway,” I said, and was immediately sorry.
“What does that mean?” Patricia asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “Let’s go to bed.”
We were in the second-story bedroom of her house on Fatback Key, where first we’d consummated our then-burgeoning romance, moonlight shining through the skylight in the cathedral ceiling as it had been on that autumn night that now seemed so very long ago. Together, we had found each other again and again and again and were surprised and delighted and grateful each and every time. Tonight Patricia was wearing a lacy white teddy, and I was wearing pajama bottoms, which bedtime attire seemed to predict a replay of that passionate night we shared under a waxing September moon too long ago. If tonight had been a movie, this scene would not have been titled “Are You Getting Enough Lately?”
I started to explain to Patricia that ever since the day she drove me home from the hospital—
And, oh dear God, how small and sad and forlorn I’d felt on that sunny day last May, how pitiably insufficient, how weak and dependent and utterly incapable of coping I’d felt on that bright hopeless day, no pun intended, but oh dear God it did seem a Hope-less day because the pallid figure sitting beside Patricia was definitely not Matthew Hope but an impostor who had taken his place.
She could not have known that lying beside her in bed that night four months ago, I had wept silently and secretly, despairing that I would ever regain full strength, cursing God for having allowed me to step into the path of two speeding bullets faster than I was, knowing I would forever be an invalid, a man who’d survived a coma perhaps, but a man who would never be quite himself again, a person to be pitied instead, perhaps despised instead, a person not quite whole.
“Ever since that day,” I started to say, and she said, “Yes?” and I said, “Ever since that day...” and she waited, and I said, “I’ve been hoping...” and she waited, and I said, “I’m very tired, Patricia, do you think we could talk about this some other time?”
We climbed into bed, and we lay there beside each other in the silent dark, well not quite dark since moonlight was splashing through the skylight. I was naked from the waist up, and Patricia was naked and long and supple from the waist down, and I thought If I try to make love to her, she’ll back away yet another time because she’s afraid I’ll break into a million pieces.
I wanted to tell her I would not break into a million pieces.
I wanted to tell her I was all right again.
Really.
We lay still and silent under the moon.
And at last Patricia sighed and said, “I hate that bitch,” and in a little while we both fell asleep.
4
“Aside from Etta Toland’s,” I said, “do you recognize any of the other names on that list?”
We were sitting in the garden behind Lainie’s house. It was ten o’clock on Saturday morning, and I had just handed her the witness list that Pete Folger had hand-delivered to my office at nine. I had not slept well the night before. Neither had Patricia. Folger was all smiles when he suggested that I ask my client to plead to Murder Two and thirty years, rather than risking the electric chair on the Murder One indictment. He wanted to move this along fast, he said. I wondered why.
Lainie wasn’t wearing glasses this morning.
Her hair sleep-tousled, no makeup on her face, wearing a red and black, floral-print, knee-length kimono sashed at the waist, she sat sipping black coffee under the shade of a pepper tree, squinting at the document I’d just handed her. She was wearing the heart-shaped ring on her pinky; I wondered if she slept with it on. Her legs were crossed. A short baby-doll nightgown in the same floral print showed where the kimono ended high on her thigh. She kept jiggling her foot.
“I don’t know any of these people,” she said. “Who are these people?”
“The witnesses who testified to the grand jury.”
“What’d they say?”
“Well, we don’t know yet. Enough to get an indictment, that’s for sure.”
“Does he have other witnesses, too?”
“If not now, then he certainly will by the time we go to trial. But he’ll supply their names when I make demand for discovery.”