"Please sit."
I sat back down.
"It was a man who lives in the apartment above me. A married man with kids. He came, pretending to want to borrow a cup of something."
"You fought him?"
"I tried to outsmart him. Then he tied my arms behind my back. There was nothing I could do."
"Are you hurt?" Priscilla asked. "Anywhere."
"My face smarted a lot for a while from a hard slap. My wrists hurt. Nothing serious."
"Thank heaven," I said.
She told us about the hospital, what happened at the police station, and then the strange experience with Dr. Koch. I couldn't believe a psychoanalyst could be so insensitive.
"I'm going to fix up your bedroom," said Priscilla. "Won't be a minute."
"Oh I'll do that, Mother."
"We don't use the linen closet any more. We had a bad roof leak that kept getting everything damp in there. I'll be right back."
When we were alone, Francine said, "Could I have a drink?"
"Of course. What would you like?"
I prepared a scotch and water.
"Thank you. I'm afraid to go back to the apartment. He might try again. There must be some legal way of protecting me."
I was thinking of ways that weren't legal. The poker that I still held in my hands. The rifle leaning against the stairs. I am not a violent man, yet I felt rage.
Though drink late at night doesn't agree with me, I poured myself a stronger scotch than I had poured for her. I wanted to go over to Francine, take her hands, raise her to her feet, enfold her, restore her. Yet the truth is I was thinking she was soiled.
When Priscilla came back down, I thought there might be something the women would want to talk about alone, so I excused myself and went upstairs to put the rifle away, hoping I could put my anger away with it. When I did, I knew I had come upstairs for another reason. It was a vicious thing to do. I felt governed by necessity when I reached among the few books I keep in the bedroom to the volume of outdated procedures that I knew Priscilla would never pick up, and from its pages I took the small envelope that was sealed and marked "private" in my own hand. I put it in the pocket of my dressing gown and returned downstairs.
Francine seemed to have calmed somewhat, whether from the drink or the conversation with her mother I did not know.
"Thomassy," I said. "That's the name of the lawyer who might be able to help you. I don't know how these things work, whose arm has to be twisted, but he'll know. I'll speak to him. I hope he can see you. Meanwhile, you must stay here."
It'd been many years since I'd seen Priscilla kiss Francine good night.
"I'll be right up," I said to Priscilla, but I knew I could never resume what the sound of the car had interrupted. Francine was about to follow her mother up when I said, "Could I have a word with you?"
I sat two or three feet away from her so that I would not have to raise my voice.
"Thomassy is a very busy man, mainly because he's the best we have in this county at his kind of work. I mean criminal law. You'll have to be very candid with him. Are you prepared for that?"
"I was candid with the hospital and the police and it got me nowhere."
"That's not what I mean. Francine, the man who — that man, is it possible you did something to entice him?"
"Of course not!" Her face flowered in a blush.
"Are you sure?"
"Oh, Dad, what do you think I am?"
"I once thought I knew."
I took the envelope out of my pocket, opened it where it'd been Scotch-taped down, and took the photograph out. It was a Polaroid picture of Francine completely nude, stretched out like an odalisque, posing.
"Who took this?" I asked, handing it to her, remembering both the anger and excitement I had felt when I first came upon it.
"Where did you find this?"
"Thank God I found it and not your mother. Who took it?"
"It's really not your business."
"You are free to do whatever you like, Francine, but anyone who will pose for a lascivious photograph like that could have a very difficult time persuading the authorities or a jury that she was innocent of enticement. It wasn't taken by a woman, was it?"
"No."
I had expected her to hand it back to me. Or tear it up. She did neither.
"I'm going up," she said. "Good night."
Those words were in the coldest voice she had ever used with me. Might she be thinking why had I not destroyed the photograph when I found it wedged behind a drawer of her dressing table when I moved it into the attic? Might she be wondering how often I had looked at it? I had produced something unspeakable. And the worst was I wanted that picture back.
Nine
Thomassy
The line of Francine's neck was a stretched, soft "s" from below her earlobe to the delicate indentation just above her collarbone. Was it that, or the high cheekbones and the almond eyes? I was used to observing the details of appearance the way a detective looks for clues. I observed Francine, however, the way one reacts in a museum when you turn a comer into a room and suddenly see an exquisitely beautiful portrait of an unknown woman and begin to wonder what she was like to the man who, in life, touched her. Thomassy, I told myself, you are not a gallery goer; your natural habitat is the raucous courtroom full of thieves, adversaries, and spectators. She is not your scene. This is not your type of woman.
Like most men of my generation, I was accustomed to admiring the shape of a woman's calf when she crossed her legs. If a woman wore décolletage, I was aware of the part of her bosom that showed and of the part that didn't show. If a young lady was walking ahead of me, I'd notice the tuck at her waist or the way the halves of her buttocks alternated as she walked. Then all of a sudden kids were all over the streets saying This is my body, so what.
In my peek-a-boo generation, even the best of women were brought up as cockteasers. Now that they're older and hear the clock running, they're as determined to get under the sheets as any man. That's your type of woman, Thomassy. You go to dinner, a movie, then fuck. If she's married, you meet someplace safe and fuck. It's a simple program. What the hell are you doing watching that undeniably erotic line of Francine Widmer's neck as if she were an eighteenth-century painting? She's a braless kid. A client.
I had a mentor in law school who said, Don't put your penis in your pocketbook Leave clients alone.
"I don't think you've got a case," I told her.
She didn't expect me to say that. She thought she'd been convincing.
"We don't have the ingredients," I said. "When you're cooking, you lay out the steak, the potatoes, lettuce and tomatoes for a salad, right, and you know you've got a meal in the making."
"Don't condescend to a woman by using kitchen examples. In the kitchen, I improvise. So can you."
"What I meant was I don't see the ingredients of a case a D.A. can go into a courtroom and prove. He needs to say that a certain individual did so-and-so. This is the evidence. And he's got to know opposing counsel won't upset his prima facie case. He can't just wing it. Too much would depend on how he delivered his testimony, how well you stood up under cross-examination in very tough territory."
"And you wouldn't want the D.A. to risk his reputation on me as a witness?"
"We don't have any other witnesses. And not much in the way of corroborative evidence."
"You don't want to take this on."
"I'm not prepared to make a commitment," I said.
She looked at me, then said, "I won't let you down."
"I didn't mean that."
"I'm a good student," she said.
"I'm sure."
"How good a teacher are you?"
In the courtroom you learn that a witness who's a rug is no fun, you need the resilience, the springback of a witness who tries to parry your questions.