"I said perceived threat, Mrs. Gooding. I am talking about a set-piece-a stratagem. There would be no real risk."
Showing as little emotion as he, she picked up her glass and threw it hard at his head. He shifted his weight. The glass sailed past to shatter against the window. In New York, people who live in glass houses have to have stoneproof walls; it's in the building code.
"I'm paying you to win this in court, you son of a bitch. Not to play games with my daughter's life."
He showed her the ghost of a smile. "What do you think the law is but playing games with people's lives?"
"Get out," she said. "Get out of my house."
"Certainly." Calm. Always calm. Infuriating, impermeable, irresistible. "Anything the client desires. But reflect on this: Not even I can get your daughter for you if you don't want her badly enough to sacrifice."
Sprout clung tightly to her parents' hands. "Mommy and Daddy, be nice to each other," she said solemnly. "In that court place, everybody always sounds mad all the time. It makes me afraid."
She clouded up and started to sniffle. "I'm afraid they'll take me away from you."
Her mother hugged her, hard. "Honey, we'll always be with you." A hooded look to Mark. "One of us will. Always."
Sprout let Kimberly lower her onto the mattress among the stuffed toys and gazed up with wide eyes. "Promise?"
"Promise," her mother said.
"Yeah," Mark said around an obstruction in his throat. "One of us will always be around. We can promise you that much."
Kimberly sipped Chianti from her jelly jar. "Your room looks so naked without all the psychedelia." Candlelight struck half-moon amethyst highlights off her eyes. "I mean, who'd -imagine you without that huge poster of Tom Marion over your bed?"
He smiled ruefully. "The worst part is this futon I got in place of my old mattress. It's like nothing at all sometimes. I wake up with sore patches on my knees and elbows from the floor."
Kimberly drank wine and sighed. Mark tried hard not to think about the way her breasts rode up inside the thin cotton blouse. He'd been alone too long.
"Oh, Mark, what happened to us?"
He shook his head. His eyes grew misty. Way back and down, he felt derisive sounds coming out of Flash and Cosmic Traveler, sitting like hecklers in the cheap seats of his mind. It was rare enough they agreed on anything. He felt wordless care and concern from Moonchild, nothing at all from Aquarius. Starshine was vaguely disapproving. He was probably afraid Mark was going to have fun. It wasn't socially conscious.
She moistened her lips. "I know St. John is being awfully hard on you. I wish it didn't have to be this way." He looked at her with eyes that felt as if they had no moisture in them, parched by each random breath of air. It was strange, considering how close he was to tears. Would it do me any good to beg? he wondered. Oh, please, the Traveler said.
She settled back on his pillow. Even in the eighties a man got to have a pillow. For a moment she half lay that way, one leg cocked, her hair hanging in her eyes and around her shoulders with just a little bit of perm kink still in it. He thought she'd never looked so beautiful. Not even when she was carrying Sprout and they were both breaking their necks to make believe that everything was going to work out.
She sighed again. "All my life I've had this feeling of shapelessness," she began.
Mark's mouth said, "Oh, baby, don't talk that way, you're beautiful," before he could stop it. Flash and Traveler hooted and twirled noisemakers. Even Moonchild winced.
Kimberly ignored him. "It's like I've always been searching for landmarks to define myself by: jocks, radicals." A smile. "You."
She smoothed her hair back and let her head drop toward one shoulder. "Does any of this make any sense?" Mark made earnest noises. She smiled and shook her head.
"After we split I spent a few years in heavy therapy. I guess you knew about that, huh? Then one day I decided it was time to try something new, just completely different from anything I'd done before. I did the furthest-out thing I could think of set out to become a by-God businesswoman, a real hard-charging lady entrepreneur. Entrepreneuse. Whatever. Is that strange, or what?"
She laughed. "And I did, Mark, I did it. I do it. Racquetball and power lunches. I even have a muscular male bimbo for a secretary, even if he is gay. You can't imagine what this is costing me in lost time, aside from dear St. John's astronomical fees."
Mark looked away and felt selfish for reflexively thinking of what all this was costing him, and not at all in terms of money.
"Then I met Cornelius. He's really a wonderful man."
"I'm sure you'd like him if you got to know him. Only you and he are… worlds apart."
She poured them both more wine. "Domestic little creature, aren't I? I'm starting to have the horrible suspicion that no matter how liberated I think I am, my gut notion's Norman Rockwell. You know, all those Saturday Evening Post covers when we were kids-don't make faces like that, I know it's silly. But I want to capture that feed."
She leaned toward him. He ached to stroke her hair. "Anything you want is fine. I want you to be happy." She smiled at him, sidelong. "You really mean that, don't you? In spite of what's going on."
He wanted to say-well, everything. But the words tried to come so fast they jammed tight in his throat. She brought her face close to his. Her mass of hair shadowed both their faces.
"Remember that guy I went with in high school? The big guy, blond, captain of the football team?"
Mark winced at long-remembered pain. "Yeah."
She laughed softly. "About three weeks after he broke your nose, he broke mine." She set the jelly glass down beside the futon and kissed him lightly on the lips.
"Funny how things turn out sometimes, huh?"
His lips were numb and stinging all at once, as if somebody had punched him in the mouth. She slipped her hand behind his head, drew his face to hers. Almost he hung back. Then their mouths touched again, and her tongue slid between his lips, teased across his teeth. He grabbed her like a drowning man and clung, with his hands, his lips, his soul.
In her sleep, in her room, Sprout cried out.
They were both on their feet at once. Mark just beat Kimberly through the door of his microscopic bedroom. Lying on her own lumpy mattress, Sprout murmured to herself, hugged her Pooh-bear closer to herself, and rolled over and back deeper into sleep. Mark and Kimberly watched her for a moment, not speaking, barely breathing. Kimberly disengaged, went and sat on the futon. Mark practically melted beside her, reaching for her. She was tense, unyielding.
"I'm sorry," she said without looking at him. "It won't work. Don't you see? I've tried this. I can't go back."
"But we can be together I'd do anything for you-for Sprout. We can be, like, a family again."
She glanced at him over her shoulder. Her eyes gleamed with tears. "Oh, Mark. It can't be. You're too much the free spirit. "
"What's wrong with freedom?"
"Responsibility took its place."
"But I can be what you wannl I'll do anything for you. I can help give you shape, if that's what you need." Smiling sadly, she shook her head. She stood up, faced him, took his face in her hands. "Oh, Mark," she said, and kissed him lightly but chastely on the lips, "I do love you. But really, it's all you can do to get up feet-first in the morning."
She was gone. Mark lurched to his feet, but her Reeboks were already doing a muted Ginger Baker number down the stairs. He hung there in the door frame, heart pounding. He could feel it especially in the scrotum; his belly and inner thighs ached and trembled with frustrated tension.
He had almost forgotten what the blue balls felt like. This shit, JJ Flash said, has got to stop.
"Dr. Pretorius, what do you mean by appearing in my court like this?"
"You mean this, your honor?" He gestured at his right leg. The immaculately tailored trousers ended at the knee. The limb below was black and green and wanted like a frog's. Yellow pus oozed from a dozen lesions. Judge Conover's nose wrinkled at the smell.