“Your Honor, I offer the certificate in evidence.”
“Any objections?”
“None.”
“Your Honor, may we also mark this document?”
“Mark it plaintiff’s exhibit number three.”
“Ms. Commins, I now show you another document. Can you tell me what it is?”
“Yes, it’s the original copyright registration certificate for Gladly.”
“Did any drawings accompany the application for copyright?”
“They did.”
“And do they accurately depict the design of your bear?”
“And the bear’s eyeglasses.”
“Your Honor, I offer the copyright certificate and the accompanying drawings in evidence.”
“Objections?”
“None.”
“Ms. Commins,” I said, “how would you describe Gladly?”
“She’s a cross-eyed bear with big ears, a goofy smile, and eyeglasses that she can wear.”
“Are all these design elements original with you?”
“Yes.”
“Well, aren’t there other teddy bears in the world with big ears?”
“There are. But not like Gladly’s.”
“And goofy smiles?”
“Oh boy are there goofy smiles!” she said, and smiled in goofy imitation, which caused Santos to smile a bit goofily himself. “But not like Gladly’s.”
“Are there other cross-eyed teddy bears in the world?”
“None that I know of.”
“Then the copyrighted crossed eyes on Gladly are unique to your bear.”
“Yes.”
“As is the trademarked name.”
“Yes.”
“How about the eyeglasses? Aren’t there teddy bears who wear eyeglasses?”
“Not eyeglasses like these.”
“What’s different about these glasses?”
“They uncross her eyes.”
“No glasses like that on any other teddy bear in the world?”
“None that I know of.”
“When did the idea for this bear first come to you?”
There she was at last.
Or rather, there was her car, a faded green Chevy not unlike Warren’s own faded gray Ford, nondescript and unremarkable, nosing its way out of the parking lot like a sand shark. She looked both ways and then made a right turn and drove on up the block. Warren waited till the Chevy was out of sight. He checked his watch. Ten minutes to ten.
Give her another five minutes, he thought.
Make sure she didn’t forget something, decide to come back for it.
As Lainie Commins tells it, there are cul-de-sac streets in Calusa that make you think you’ve stepped into a time warp. Her house with its attached studio is on one of those streets. This is Calusa — this is, in fact, Florida — as it must have looked in the forties and fifties.
I have never thought of Calusa as a tropical paradise. Even in the springtime, when everything is in bloom, nothing really looks as lush or as bursting with color as it does in the Caribbean. As a matter of fact, to me, Calusa usually looks more brown than it does green, as if the grass, and the leaves on the trees and bushes, have been overlaid with a fine dust. Even the bougainvillea and hibiscus seem somehow limp and lacking in luster when compared to the extravagant display of these plants in truly tropical climates.
But in April...
Which is when the idea for Gladly first came to Lainie and which, coincidentally, was when I was flat on my ass in the Intensive Care Unit at Good Samaritan Hospital in a coma as deep as — but that’s another story.
In April, then, as Lainie tells it, the street on which she lives and works resembles a jungle through which a narrow asphalt road has been laid and left to deteriorate. The entrance to North Apple Street — there is no South Apple Street, by the way — is a mile and a half from the mainland side of the Whisper Key bridge. A sign at the street’s opening reads DEAD END appropriate in that North Apple runs for two blocks before it becomes an oval that turns the street back upon itself in the opposite direction.
Lining these two short blocks are twelve shingled houses with the sort of glass-louvered windows you could find all over Calusa in the good old days before it became a tourist destination for folks from the Middle West and Canada. The houses here are virtually hidden from view by a dense growth of dusty cabbage palm and palmetto, red bougainvillea, purple bougainvillea, white bougainvillea growing in dense profusion, sloppy pepper trees hung with curling Spanish moss, yellow-clustered gold trees, pink oleander, golden allamanda, trailing lavender lantana, rust-colored shrimp plants, yellow hibiscus, pink hibiscus, red hibiscus, eponymous bottlebrush trees with long red flowers — and here and there, the one true floral splendor of Calusa, the bird-of-paradise with its spectacular orange and bluish-purple crest.
People say about this street, “It’s still very Florida.”
Meaning it’s run-down and overgrown and wild and fetid and hidden and somehow secret and silent. “You expect to see alligators waddling out of the bushes on this street. “You expect to see bare-breasted, bare-chested Calusa Indians. What you do see are suntanned young sun-worshippers — some of them bare-chested or bare-breasted, true enough — living six or seven in each small house, performing any service that will keep them outdoors most weekdays and on the beaches every weekend. There are more gardeners, pool-cleaning people, house painters, window washers, tree trimmers, road maintenance workers, lifeguards and boatyard personnel living on the two blocks that form Apple Street than there are in the entire state of Nebraska.
In at least three of the houses here, there are people with artistic pretensions, but that is not unusual for the state of Florida in general and the city of Calusa in particular. Calusa calls itself the Athens of Southwest Florida, a sobriquet that causes my partner Frank — a transplanted native New “Yorker — to snort and scoff. Four people on Apple Street call themselves painters. Another calls himself a sculptor. A sixth calls herself a writer. Lainie Commins is the only true professional on the street. She is, after all, a trained designer with a track record of production, though none of the toys or dolls, or even a game in one instance, ever took off the way the companies for which she’d worked had anticipated.
The walls of her tiny studio are hung with actually manufactured toys she designed first for a company named Toy-works in Providence, where she worked for a year after her graduation from Risdee, and then for a company named Kid Stuff in Birmingham, Alabama, not far from her birthplace, and next for Toyland, Toyland right here in Calusa, where she worked for three years before setting out on her own in January.
The idea for Gladly comes to her at the beginning of April sometime, she can’t recall the exact date, and she tells that honestly to the Court now. The studio in which she works is so shadowed by the plants growing outside that it is dark even in the daytime. She works with a huge fluorescent light over her table, sketching ideas, developing them, refining them. She wears glasses when she works. In fact, she wears them all the time, except here in this courtroom today, where Matthew wants Judge Santos to notice that wandering right eye and forge a connection between Lainie’s condition and that of the bear she created. The strabismus, as her visual defect is called, commenced when she was three years old. At least, that was when her mother first detected what was then merely a slight turning-out of the right eye. Glasses failed to correct the condition. Two operations to shorten the muscle also proved fruitless. The right eye continued to wander. (When Lainie was sixteen, her mother confided to a friend that her daughter had “a wandering eye,” but she wasn’t talking about the strabismus.) Lainie explains her condition to the Court now, gratuitously contributing the fact that the word “strabismus” comes from the Greek word strabos, which means “squinting” — there you are, lads. A cockeyed squint, after all!