"Yes."
"The hospital, everything, I go home to my wife and children, she almost breaks my head for me all over again." He smiled. Sally kept watching him. He had a fascinating way of holding his cigarette between thumb and forefinger, the wrist bent outwards, so that he seemed rather effete as he puffed on it, rather like Peter Lorre playing a spy on the Orient Express, completely unlike a bricklayer.
"Tuesday is okay," he said. "Yesterday all day is okay too," he said, "but last night, ah! Six o'clock, yes? I come home from work, and who is waiting there? A detective."
"A police detective?"
"Correct," he said, and gave a small nod of his bullet-shaped head, and then cupped the cigarette in his reversed manner, and took a long obviously satisfying drag on it, and again exhaled a cloud of sweet-smelling smoke. My mother should be here, Sally thought, she would die from the smell alone. What is he smoking, Sally darling — pot? Mother, I'm sure it's not pot, what do you know about pot? I read the New York Post, Gertie would reply.
"Is it bothering you, the cigarette?" Hadad asked.
"No," she lied. "What about this detective?"
"It comes around that your friend, the lawyer, he has called his friend, the judge. His name is Santesson, the circus judge."
"Circuit," Sally said.
"Correct," Hadad said, and puffed again on his cigarette. "This detective, he comes from the judge's suggestion, he is investigating the big accident!" Hadad waved the hand with the cigarette in a grand sweeping gesture, smoke trailing behind it. "Criminal assault, he says."
"Who?"
"Me, who else?"
"This detective was investigating a charge of criminal assault against you?"
"Correct."
"Yes, go on."
"A year in prison, he says. Is this true?"
"I'm not sure."
"Or pay five hundred dollars?" Hadad said, looking at her expectantly, as though hoping she would deny it.
"Perhaps," Sally said.
"I can't afford neither," Hadad said, and sighed deeply. He looked at the cigarette in his cupped palm, sighed again when he discovered it had almost burned down, and then took the tin from his inside jacket pocket again and began going through the same complicated and fumbling maneuver of extricating a fresh cigarette from the sliding, tumbling, willful cigarettes in the box, the task made more difficult because he was now holding a lighted cigarette in one trembling hand. Watching him, Sally felt a sudden empathy, as though this shoddy, nervous man in his Sunday clothes accurately reflected the shabbiness of her Fourteenth Street walkup legal firm, sidewalk law at discount prices. He sat before the huge plate-glass window overlooking the street, the goldleaf letters S. KIRSCH, ATTORNEY AT LAW inverted so that they read correctly from the street, and below that the WORD ABOGADO, and in the corner of the window, also backwards so that the street trade could read it and perhaps be tempted by it, NOTARY PUBLIC, and the red seal below that, and further down the word translated into Spanish for the benefit of the myriad Puerto Ricans in the city who" were constantly being asked to have legal documents of all sorts notarized. She sat down behind an old wooden desk which she had bought at one of the secondhand furniture places on 23rd Street, in a revolving chair her mother jokingly said had once belonged to Oliver Wendell Holmes or Sherlock Holmes, she forgot which one, and looked across as Hadad finally extricated a cigarette from the tin and then shakingly began plucking loose cigarettes from his lap as though they were scattered daisy petals, the dark green filing cabinets behind him, the ancient inoperative air conditioner built into one window panel, the sky beyond as gray as death. This is what I have, she thought. I'm thirty-three years old, and I was graduated from N.Y.U. Law in the summer of 1963 (a late bloomer, Gertie called me) and here I am in a shabby office on a shabby street, watching an Arab pluck cigarettes from his lap. Sally Kirsch, Attorney at Law.
Sally Kirsch, attorney at law, had moved out of her mother's apartment the week after she passed the bar exams. Her mother Gertrude, a stout blond lady of dubious German-Austrian-Serbian extraction, when informed that Sally's new apartment was in the Village, immediately asked, "What will you do now? Start sleeping with all those beatniks down there?" Sally informed her that she had not yet slept with anyone (a lie), beatnik or otherwise, although the opportunity had certainly presented itself on many an occasion even while living here in the sanctified atmosphere of this fine home on Third Avenue and 85th Street. She did not expect to begin now, she said (another lie necessitated by the first lie), unless she choose to, which is exactly what she would have done no matter where she lived. "A fine girl," Gertie said. "You wouldn't be so smart if your father was alive."
Unfortunately, her father was not alive, had in fact been dead since Sally was six, at which time he was struck down by a bus on Second Avenue while crossing the street from his dry goods store. Sally had always suspected he was drunk at the time. Her sharpest memory of her father was of a tall, thin man with her identical green eyes and sandy hair, stooping to kiss her on the cheek, his breath smelling of something she only later could identify as wine. She was sure he'd been drunk. A man didn't get hit by something as big as a bus unless he was too drunk to see the damn thing. Her mother (significantly, she felt) never drank. She sometimes wondered if her mother had ever made love, evidence of conception and birth to the contrary.
In some of her more lurid fantasies, Sally reconstructed an image of her own first bed partner, an N.Y.U. undergraduate, now married and teaching English somewhere in Schenectady, unable to forget that hot sophomore maniac who had almost eaten him alive. In soberer moments, she thought of herself as essentially healthy, but hardly very passionate, a girl who understood the biological needs of her body and periodically set out to gratify them. Her three affairs had been of short duration, the most recent having been with an internal revenue agent, of all things, and having ended in April when he asked her (after a particularly passionate session) whether she had remembered to file her W-2. He also happened to be married, which may have partially accounted for her sudden decision, although she did not normally consider this an excluding factor. She did not, in fact, know what specific rules governed her morality or lack of it, except a basic rule of survival which advised her never to get pregnant.
Getting pregnant, according to Gertie, was one of the most horrible misfortunes that could ever befall a woman. "You were such a cranky baby, Sally darling, kept me up half the night, my milk wouldn't flow, my breasts were always hurting, and besides your father wanted a boy" — which translated from the dubious German-Austrian-Serbian meant "I, Gertie, wanted a boy." In any case, the advice had struck. It was bad to get pregnant under the best of circumstances, but tragic to get pregnant if you did not happen to have a husband. Since Sally did not happen to have a husband, nor particularly want one, she had immediately after her encounter with the budding Schenectady English teacher, and without any fuss or bother, rushed off to buy herself a diaphragm. (In later years, upon reading Mary McCarthy's precious "peccary" anecdote, she had said aloud, "Oh, how cutesy-cute!") Seven months ago, when she first took up with the internal revenue agent recently dispossessed, she abandoned the diaphragm in favor of birth control tablets, which she still religiously swallowed each morning. In one of her customary fishing expeditions, Gertie had asked what she thought of these new birth control pills, and Sally had replied, lying with a gracious blush, that she possessed no knowledge whatever of them. Her mother stuffed a dried apricot into her mouth, nodded her head sagely, and said, "They grow beards on women," and Sally almost brought her hand unconsciously to her chin.