"That's exactly what he did."
"Then where did he get the idea?"
"What do you mean?" Leo asked.
"For the other character? The second character."
"Where?"
"From the play, Leo."
"What play?"
"Catchpole."
"What?"
"In our files, Leo."
"What?"
"At the studio, Leo."
"He never said that."
"He didn't have to say it."
"Why would anyone think…"
"Because first he said, Yes that's what I did, I made two characters out of one, but then he couldn't remember which characters he'd put together to form the second character, and then he said the villain in the book wasn't a queer, or even the guy in the picture, and Leo I am telling you he made a holy mess of the whole damn thing."
"Well, he may be a horse's ass," Leo said, "but he is a bright horse's ass. I cannot believe…"
"It's what he did, Leo."
"He's too smart for that."
"He's a jerk, Leo."
"A whole lot smarter than most directors around."
"A moron, Leo."
"And certainly smarter than a tinhorn shyster like Brackman."
"Leo, he may have wrecked our case beyond repair."
"The stupid bastard," Leo said.
If Christie were here, Jonah thought, she would pour some boric acid into hot water (it must be scalding hot, darling, she would say) and then insist that I soak my wrist in it, changing the water whenever it got lukewarm, that's what Christie Dunseath Willow would do. And I would allow her to do it while marveling at how adequately she ministered to my needs, and delighting in the sight of her, and simultaneously knowing that we did not have a marriage at all. Oh how surprised they all were, our friends, oh how shocked, stunned, disbelieving when they learned that Christie and I were going to part (but they're such a darling couple) that we were going to take up separate residence and live separate lives (so marvelously alert, so much fun to be with) that finally we were going to end this ridiculous, sham exercise, recognize it for what it really was, and chalk it off as a total failure (both so bright and talented, so very much alive).
Talented, yes, the very talented Jonah Willow who defended a pair of Communist adolescents trying to change the world by blowing up Gracie Mansion, and then found himself defending similar unpopular clients and causes in the years that followed. Talented, yes, and bright enough to recognize the public need for a champion, clever enough to set out to fill that need. A man loses his innocence once and for all time when he makes a calculation he knows is even slightly dishonest, makes it (he will tell himself) for the sake of Survival, or Ambition, or Health or Sanity, or for the sake of Honesty to Oneself (the most dishonest reason) but makes it coldly and shrewdly and with malice aforethought. Jonah was bright enough and clever enough to recognize that he had successfully defended two rather unsavory individuals (because their Rights Were Being Violated, he told himself, and perhaps was being Honest to Himself) and that his less than brilliant courtroom display had put his name before the public eye, where he intended to keep it. It was no accident that the firm of Gauthier and Willow defended in the next several years a succession of individuals accused of murder, rape, pornography, spying, draft evasion, government manipulation of contracts, obscenity, and other such exotic and lofty activities executed by believers, fanatics, followers and fools of every persuasion.
But if a man loses his innocence only once, a woman surely loses it twice, and neither time has anything to do with her defloration. Christie lost her innocence for the first time when she realized her father wasn't God, and she lost it for the second time when she realized Jonah wasn't God, either. She realized this in the early years of her marriage and was not bright enough to find any solace in historical precedent. She only knew that she had married someone who pretended to be what he was not. What she expected Jonah to be was never clearly defined to him, although she repeatedly told him he was a fraud and a fake, even before the succession of unpopular wrongdoers began parading to his office door. He quite naturally regarded this condemnation as unfair and a trifle hostile, even though he suspected it had nothing to do with professional ethics or personal ambitions, but only with Christie's image of him as a man, an image he was somehow destroying. He once asked her, "Why am I a fake and a fraud?" and she answered, "Because you are," which was considerably enlightening and which helped to ease tensions between them that week, especially since she was in her sixth month of pregnancy by that time, and had begun denying him connubial rights in her fourth month. "You're insensitive," she told him. "You don't know what a woman feels."
Amy came on the seventh of May, 1954, and the birth was every bit as painful and as horrible as Christie knew it would be, an ordeal for which she never fully forgave Jonah. She made it clear the day she came home from the hospital that this was to be their one and only venture into parenthood, and that if he so much as looked at her before she was properly prepared for "having sex," she would strangle him without remorse. Her preparations for "having sex," as she invariably referred to it ("Do you want to have sex?" she would ask, not without a wicked glint in her eye) assumed ritual proportions in the months that followed. She would spend what seemed like hours in the bathroom before coming to him. Once he fell asleep waiting for her, and once he sent her a memo on a Tuesday, actually mailed it from his office to the house, reading: "Thursday night! Get ready!" But despite these rigorous preparations, they "had sex" often and with apparent satisfaction, and the only time he ever thought of getting himself another woman was in the year just before the divorce, by which time things had become really impossible.
Christie was a beautiful woman, and most beautiful women can say or do anything they wish, as long as they perform with a certain amount of style. She possessed style in abundance, from the tips of her Bendel shoes to the top of her Victor Vito coiffure. Her eyes snapped with whiplash certainty whenever she delivered another of her absurd banalities. She would stand with hands on narrow hips, flatchested but sinuous and sexy as hell, splendid legs widespread as though she were trying to maintain balance on the deck of a lurching yawl, head tossed back, tiny beauty spot penciled near her lips, a spirited laugh (her mother's) erupting after each of her own half-witticisms. "Craparoo," of course, was her identifying theme, and was repeated with the regularity of the NBC chimes. But she knew other devastatingly funny catch phrases, too, and she used them with similar frequency, to the amusement of all their new friends.
Nor was her comic virtuosity limited to verbal thrusts alone. She began drinking too much, and told Jonah to go to hell whenever he brought this failing to her attention. He once found her in the bedroom with a young actor whose nose he punched, her skirt up over her knees, oblivious to what the son of a bitch was attempting. (On the night he decided to end it, she kept sipping a glass of sherry which she finally left on the dresser, and which the next morning had its surface covered with a scum of floating dead fruit flies.) Figuratively, Christie rode her mother's horse into every living room, theater, restaurant, concert hall, and night club in New York — and because she had a good seat and remarkable hands, everyone applauded her performance. Except Jonah. Jonah wondered what had happened to the little girl who used to pick her delicate way through the forsythia bushes.
Maybe she grew up too soon, or maybe she never grew up at all, or maybe they both grew up simultaneously but in opposite directions. This too shall pass, she assured him, but of course it did not. By the tenth year, of their marriage he was ready to agree with her that it was all craparoo. The odd thing about it, he thought now as he struggled with his pajama top, his wrist throbbing, the odd thing about it was that he had loved her all that time, and probably had still loved her when they decided there was no use going any further with it. He could remember watching her undress one night, here in this bedroom, taking her time with her underthings, and then floating a nylon gown down over her slender body while he watched from the bed, delighting in her presence, could remember the sidelong glance she gave him as she turned out the light, could remember his intense excitement, and her cold "Put that away, buster. We're calling it quits, remember?" Yes, he could remember.