Why are you looking at me that way?
Just shifting the paradigm a little bit. And did you ever change roles?
Occasionally.
Did you like being whipped?
No, I … I don’t know.
Did you prefer that to being the dominant party?
You’re the analyst; you tell me.
And these sessions gave you staying power?
Kept me erect.
A riding crop. Isn’t that what your father used on you?
Yes. .
I’m sorry, Jonathan, I can’t hear what you’re saying. .
Hated him.
What?
I hated him.
But you also loved him.
Aw, shit.
Would you like some coffee? We have a lot of work to do today.
PART THREE
Let us live and love, my Lesbia, and value at a penny all the talk of crabbed old men. Suns may set and rise again: for us, when our brief light has set, there’s the sleep of perpetual night. Give me a thousand kisses.
I awake before dawn after dreams dimly recalled, but pulsing, erotic. I am confused: What is that distant electric buzz that confounds the stark silence I have grown so used to? I am in the city; it breathes raspy outside those windows.
I feel buoyant, rested. I have slept well again. I rise and shower and dress, slip quietly from the house, and walk north to English Bay, to the long, flat beaches of Spanish Banks. I do my tai chi here on the sands of ebb tide, dancing barefoot as the eastern sky begins to colour: face east, raise both hands slowly, turn on the right hand, face north.
North: I am at the centre of the compass of my trial. To the west, above the Point Grey cliffs, the campus and the law school. Facing me, the mountains of the North Shore, dressed in a cloak of cloud. Just beneath those peaks, high in the British Properties, the abode of Clarence de Remy Brown. Lower down, the house of alleged shame where Jon O’Donnell restlessly sleeps. Not far to the east, the former atelier of Dominique Lander.
And beyond, buried amidst those towers gleaming golden in the morning sun: the courts. Where all things will be decided. Where I must play my unwished for role: inquisitor at the auto-da-fe of Joan of Arc, her public burning. This saucy scamp is telling false — I have no choice but to believe that. She, not Jonathan, is the evildoer. I will not abide any other possibility. I must quell any doubts I harbour about his innocence.
Yet I feel uneasy, lacking in confidence. Has the soft life of my island idyll caused me to lose the lust for victory? Formerly, I compensated for a career of impotence in bed with a show of virility in court. Ironically, have recent rigid stirrings in the night rendered me a less virile warrior for justice? I must be bloody, bold, and resolute.
As I walk east — Locarno Beach, Jericho Park, Kitsilano Beach — my thoughts turn to Margaret, to my island, but as I tramp up Burrard Street Bridge, my other, sweeter world begins to melt away. As I find my way into the busy downtown streets, I feel myself begin to mutate into a previous life form. I am becoming a lawyer again.
Roberto whirls dramatically about my unruly thatch with scissors and clippers, hair flying in all directions.
“We don’t want to be frightening the jury, do we? Like some mad hermit just down from the hills. Fatherly, that’s how we want you. Kindly and wise. But a military cut to the beard — I call this creation the naval commander. We are sending messages of firmness. We are in control.”
Augustina Sage stands by, absorbed in one of her briefs of law. Gowan Cleaver is pacing in the hallway outside. Three young articling students are also out there, with valises and bookbags. A limousine is parked out front.
“Augustina, you must tell that mob to disperse. I don’t want the jury feeling the Crown is outnumbered, or that we’ve money coming out of our ears. And tell Gowan to get rid of the limousine. We will take a homely taxi.”
She leaves to do this.
“You see, the magic is working,” says Roberto. “We are in control.”
He whirls me around to the mirror. Roberto has re-created me. Commander Beauchamp at the tiller of his leaky man-of-war.
Now I am in my undershorts in the barristers’ changing room. I am putting on an iron-fresh white shirt with a wing-tip collar. I am slipping on my black vest. I am tying on my dickey. I am hoisting up my pinstripe pants, and fastening my suspenders to them — the belt which comes with these pants is meant for a certain former fattie. Finally I don my robe, and I am now in my silks, costumed for the play.
My role, of course, being one of those comic-book heroes in tights and ceremonial capes. And suddenly I am feeling surges of a Batmaniacal strength. Perhaps the power of love is adding fuel to the adrenalin that courses through me in a courtroom. Omnia vincit amor.
It is ten o’clock as I walk from the dressing room and down a hall empty but for a few lawyers scurrying to their courtrooms. I climb the stately wide staircases of the atrium-lobby to the fifth floor. And I stop as I turn a corner. A vast, milling throng is in the mezzanine seeking entry into this spectacle ad captandum vulgus: the prurient, the tantalized, and the merely curious. A flock of young people — probably law students. The Women’s Movement seems well represented. Reporters are having their credentials checked by Barney Willit, the brown-uniformed sheriff’s officer, so they can be assured of seats.
“Morning, Mr. Beauchamp,” he says. “Sold-out house today. The judge wants everyone sorted out before he opens court. Jury panel’s in there now.”
I peek inside at the backs of sixty heads, citizens called from home, office, and plant to do their democratic duty. Court staff but no lawyers. Where is Augustina, where the client?
At the end of a hall, by the door to a witness room, I spy Kimberley Martin and Clarence de Remy Brown. Kimberley wears a blue, ankle-length outfit that looks both chic and chere, but she does not seem as blithe and bouncy as when last observed climbing from a hot tub. In fact, she looks spent, enervated, as she grips the arm of her fiance. There are dark areas under her eyes. I had not expected she would be under so much stress — or is this a sensitive portrayal of the vandalized maid? Mr. Brown, with his cyanide-spill problems in South America, seems none too happy either. They are in close session with Patricia Blueman and her junior: Gundar Sindelar, a ten-year veteran, squat as a barrel, with the reputation of a pit bull.
Ah, here comes Augustina Sage, up the stairs and weaving through the assemblage.
“Jonathan is one floor down, watching a trial,” she says. “I think he was really whacked out after his session with his therapist yesterday. I hope he’s ready. Are you?”
“Champing at the bit.”
“Not in some kind of transcendental state of abandon? Did you bring her flowers?” She chucks me under the chin.
“I’m preoccupied only with this trial,” I bluster, and quickly change the topic. “How are our chances of getting our hands on that lie detector test?”
“It’s iffy. There’s that bad case in the Supreme Court.”
“And Dominique Lander?”
“Previous similar acts by a rape defendant are admissible to prove a consistent or unique pattern: Ontario Court of Appeal. We’re in trouble there.”
“Is Miss Lander here?”
“That’s her.”
A pale, striking woman dressed in black, her features appear pencilled onto her face: a thin line of a mouth, the merest crescent moons for eyebrows. She is at the edge of the crowd, sketching on a large pad, and when she catches Augustina’s eye she nods and returns to her art. Augustina’s perception is probably accurate: She is a loose cannon and she is here to sink the Commander’s ship.