"This is not a fruitful conversation, Mr. Harnason. Or an appropriate one." I turn, but he reaches after me again.
"No harm meant, Judge. Just wanted to say hello. And thanks. You've had my life in your hands twice, Your Honor. You did me better this time than the first-at least so far." He smiles a little at the caveat, but with that thought his look grows more solemn. "Do I have a chance, at least, Judge?" Uttering the question, he suddenly seems as pathetic as an orphaned child.
"John," I say, then stop. 'John'? But there is something about the fact that Harnason and I met decades ago, and the harm I did him, that demands a less imperial pose. And I can hardly retrieve his first name now that it's come out of my mouth. "As you could tell from the argument, your points aren't falling entirely on deaf ears, John. The discussion isn't over."
"Still hope, then?"
I shake my head to indicate no more, but he thanks me nonetheless, bowing slightly in utter obsequiousness.
"Happy birthday," he calls again when I've finally turned my back on him. I walk off, fully haunted.
When I return to the building, following a mildly disturbing campaign meeting with Raymond, it is after five, the witching hour after which the public employees disappear as if sucked out by a Hoover. Anna, the hardest-working clerk I've ever had by a long measure, is here, as she often is, toiling alone. Shoeless, she wanders behind me into my inner chambers, where the rows of leather-spined legal volumes that are basically ornamental in the computer era repose on the bookshelves along with photos and mementos of family and career.
"Getting ready to go?" I ask her. We will celebrate Anna's last day with me on Friday with a dinner in her honor, something I do for all departing law clerks. The following Monday, Anna will join the litigation department in Ray Horgan's firm. She will have a higher salary than I do and a long-delayed start on Real Life. In the last twelve years, she has been an EMT, an advertising writer, a business school student, a marketing executive, and now a lawyer. Like Nat, Anna is part of a generation that often seem frozen in place by their unrelenting sense of irony. Virtually everything people believe in can be exposed as possessing laughable inconsistencies. And so they laugh. And stand still.
"I suppose," she says, then brightens. "I have a birthday card."
"After everything else?" I answer, but I accept the envelope.
"You're SIXTY," it reads. There is a picture of a knockout blonde in a tight sweater. "Too old not to know better." Overleaf: "Or to care." The card adds, "Enjoy it all!" Below, she has written simply, "Love, Anna."
'Not to care.' Were it only so. Is it just my imagination that the buxom girl on the front even looks faintly like her?
"Cute," I say.
"It was too perfect," she answers. "I couldn't pass it up."
I say nothing for a second as we stare at each other.
"Go," I finally tell her. "Work." She is, alas, very cute, green-eyed and dishwater blond, ruddy, sturdily built. She is pretty and, if not quite in the drop-dead category, full of earthy appeal. She sashays off in her straight skirt with a little extra hip roll of a broad but nicely turned behind and looks back to measure the effect. I flip my hand to tell her to keep moving.
Anna has worked for me for almost two and a half years now, longer than any other clerk I've employed. A canny lawyer with an obvious gift for this profession, she also has a sunny, eager nature. She is open with almost everyone and is frequently blazingly funny, which delights no one more than her. On top of all that, she is tirelessly kind. Because her computer skills exceed those of most of the IT staff, she is always giving up her lunch hour to fix a problem in another chambers. She bakes for my staff, remembers birthdays and the details of everybody's families. She is, in other words, a human being engaged by human beings and is beloved around the building.
But she is happier about the lives of others than she is about her own. Love, in particular, is a preoccupation. She is full of yearning-and despair. She has brought to chambers a stream of self-help titles, which she often trades with Joyce, my courtroom bailiff. Loved the Way You Want to Be. How to Know If You Are Loved Enough. When she reads at lunch, you can see her bright exterior peeled away.
Anna's lengthy stint with me, which was extended when the successor I'd hired, Kumari Bata, ended up unexpectedly pregnant and on total bed rest, has led to an inevitable familiarity. For some time now, when we work together a couple nights a week to clear up administrative orders, she allows herself a free-form confessional that often touches on her romantic misfortunes.
'I've been dating around, trying not to take anything too seriously so I don't get my hopes up,' she told me once. 'That's worked in a way. I have no hope at all.' She smiled, as she does, enjoying the humor more than the bitterness. 'You know, I was married for a nanosecond when I was twenty-two, and once it was over, I never worried I wouldn't find anybody special. I thought I was too young. But the men still are! I'm thirty-four. The last guy I went out with was forty. And he was a boy. A baby! He hadn't learned to pick up his laundry off the floor. I need a man, a real grown-up.'
All of this seemed innocent enough until a few months ago, when I began to sense that the grown-up she had in mind was me.
'Why is it so hard to get laid?' she asked me one night in December as she was describing another unrewarding first date.
'I can't believe that,' I finally said, when I could breathe.
'Not by anyone I really care about,' she answered, and abjectly shook her midlength, many-toned hairdo. 'You know, I'm really starting to say, What the hell? I'll try anything. Not anything. Not midgets and horses. But maybe I should go to one of those places I never considered. Or that I actually considered and laughed off. Because trying to do what's "normal" hasn't produced such especially good results. So maybe I should be bad. Have you been bad, Judge?' she asked me suddenly, her dark green eyes like radar.
'We've all been bad,' I said quietly.
That was a pivot point. By now, her approaches whenever we are alone are unabashed and direct-cheap double entendres, winks, everything short of a FOR SALE sign. A few nights back, she suddenly stood and laid her hand on her midriff to tighten her blouse as she stood at profile.
'Do you think I'm top-heavy?' she asked.
I took too long enjoying the sight before I answered in as neutral a tone as I could muster that she looked fine.
My excuses for tolerating this are twofold. First, at thirty-four, Anna is a little long in the tooth for judicial clerks and well beyond any developmental stage that would mark her behavior as part of childhood. Second, she will not be around here much longer. Kumari, now a healthy mom, started last week, and Anna has stayed a few final days to train her. For me, Anna's departure will be both a genuine tragedy and a considerable relief.
But since the mere passage of time is going to solve my problems, the one thing I have not done is what good judgment really requires-sit Anna down and tell her no. Gently. Kindly. With openhearted tribute to the flattery I'm being paid. But nohow, no way. I have prepared the speech several times but cannot bring myself to deliver it. For one thing, I could end up badly embarrassed. Anna's sense of humor, which could be called "male" in this Mars and Venus era, veers often to the risque. I still fear she would say this was all a joke, the kinds of cracks ventured, as we all do now and then, to be sure you don't really mean them. A sorer truth is that I am reluctant to stop drinking in the sheer aqua vitae that springs from the purported sexual willingness, even in jest, of a good-looking woman more than twenty-five years my junior.
But I have recognized all along I will turn away. I don't know what percentage of attractions are consigned to mere flirtation and never pass the best controlled of all borders, the one between imagining and actual events, but surely it's most. In thirty-six years of marriage, I have had one affair, not counting a drunken tossing in the back of a station wagon when I was in basic training for the National Guard, and that lone mad, compulsive detour into the pure excesses of pleasure led directly to me standing trial for murder. If I'm not the poster boy for Twice Wise, nobody will ever be.