” ‘And just who am I supposed to be having an affair with?’
“She looked at me with such disdain, such contempt. I had been in love with her from the first moment I ever saw her. We were married six months after we met. I was never in love with anyone but her. And the way she looked at me! It felt like someone had torn my insides out. I wanted to die, right there and then; I just wanted to stop breathing.
” ‘I can’t live like this,’ she told me. ‘I need to get away for a few days. I need time to think.’
“She went away for three days, all weekend. Monday morning she called from the hospital to talk to the kids. She said she would be home for dinner. Later that day, during a break in a trial, I went to see Jeffries. I needed someone to talk to and he was the only person I could trust with something like this.
“I can see it all quite clearly now: Jeffries sitting behind his desk, looking up at me from over his glasses. ‘I must have just missed you Saturday,’ he said. I didn’t know what he was talking about. ‘Over at the coast, at Salishan, at the bar conference. I saw Jean in the hotel lobby, talking to Antonelli. They must have been waiting for you. I couldn’t stay. I was with some other people.’
“I’m not quite sure what happened after that. I don’t remember anything about that afternoon in trial, only that all I could think about was getting home, seeing Jean, trying to convince myself that she could convince me none of it was true. When I got home, she was not there and neither were the children. A few minutes later, the doorbell rang and when I answered a stranger handed me a summons. Jean had filed for divorce.”
His elbow on the table, Elliott rested his cheekbone against his thumb and the corner of his forehead against his index finger. He sat there, lost in contemplation.
“The next day,” he said presently, an absent expression on his face, “I had the breakdown. I was in court, in the middle of that trial, when it happened. That’s what they told me, anyway. I don’t really remember.”
His eyes came back into focus. “That’s why I came to kill you.
It was the only thing I could think about, killing you because of what you had done to me.” A cryptic smile floated over his mouth.
“I’m sure Jeffries was disappointed when I didn’t. He was always telling me things about you, how you would do anything to win, and how one day it was all going to catch up with you. He told me you were the most amoral person he had ever known, and that if he had to do it over again he would have made you serve thirty days for contempt instead of three. Then someone else would have had to take over the defense in that case he said you should never have won.”
He remembered something else. “He told me once that there were people in the firm who had not wanted to bring you in, who didn’t want you there, people he knew, people who would be delighted if I was the only criminal defense attorney in the firm. You see what he was doing. He never missed a chance to stir something up, to create resentment, to make me think that without you around I’d have everything I wanted. You were the senior partner, the lawyer with the great reputation, and then, on top of everything else, you were the one who was taking away my wife.”
Elliott smiled again, that same enigmatic look that suggested that there was always something else, some deeper meaning beneath the literal meaning of what he said. His fingers brushed across his mustache, over and over again, each time faster than the time before, and then, abruptly, stopped.
“Maybe Jeffries really did know I’d have a breakdown and what would happen if I did.”
It was easy to be carried along by what he said. Not only was there a sort of logic about it all, but, like most things exotic, Elliot exerted a strange kind of attraction. The longer I stayed there, the more difficult it was to remember that I was sitting at a table inside an insane asylum talking to a mental patient.
“There is an obvious question, Elliott,” I said with a self-conscious smile. “Forget what Jeffries said about me. Why go through all this deception? Why didn’t your wife just simply file for the divorce? Why make you think I was involved?”
He answered without the slightest hesitation, as if there could not possibly be any doubt about what the truth really was. “They couldn’t afford the scandal. Judges weren’t supposed to be sleeping with the wives of the lawyers who practiced in front of them.
It would have made it more difficult to get the other thing they wanted. Jeffries did not just want my wife, he wanted my children. He’d never had any of his own.”
Elliott reported this as if it was not only a self-evident fact, but one that had nothing directly to do with him. It was the way he described nearly everything that had happened before his breakdown. I had of course heard people talk about themselves with a certain detachment, passing judgment on their own behavior, but never anything like this. There was a break in time for Elliott, as definite as the way we divide all of history into what came before and what came after Christ. When he talked about things that happened before his commitment, there was no connection between what he was now and what he had been then. The old Elliott was dead, and, as near as I could tell, the new Elliott did not miss him at all.
Elliott’s eyes glistened with laughter. “If all this sounds a little paranoid-well, I am, a little paranoid, that is. That’s what they tell me, anyway. Of course, that’s what they tell everyone here.
Paranoid schizophrenia. They always try to give it a little twist, something that makes it sound like they really know what they’re talking about. Type I or Type II, delusions of this or delusions of that, acute or not so acute. And they always say it with such gravity, such enormous seriousness, and with the same somber, slow-moving gestures, the head bent forward, the hands behind the back, the stooped shoulder. You would think they were in church, getting ready to take communion. Paranoid schizophrenia.” His eyes turned hard and his voice was filled with contempt.
“They cover their ignorance with that phrase. It gives them a sense of power. They’re the ones who are really sick.”
At the end of the room, the orderly got to his feet and stretched his arms. All around, the patients began to stir.
“Time for class,” Elliott explained. The contempt had vanished.
His manner was almost playful. “Staff call it group therapy; we call it class. There are several different classes. My personal favorite is ‘medication management.’ We learn about the symptoms of our illness and how to manage them.” His eyes filled with mirth and he shut them partway to keep from laughing out loud.
“Think of it,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “You explain to someone that he’s a paranoid schizophrenic. Then, as if this was all news to him, you explain the symptoms to look for. You tell him that these symptoms can be kept under control by medication, and that the trick is to take the medication in the prescribed dosage at the precise moment that you first detect the symptom.
In other words, you explain to him that he’s crazy, and then you tell him all the perfectly reasonable things he can do not to show it.”
There seemed never to be any gradual transition between his moods. It was one thing, then it was another. He had been cheerful and ironic; now he seemed completely serious.
“The strange part is that it seems to work. Some people become quite good at it. They learn to deal with their disease, to control it, and even perhaps to use it. Some of them, I think, even learn how to hide behind it.”
I did not know what he meant by this last remark. “Hide behind it?”