Jack adhered to the lofty view that adultery was merely the application of democracy to love. He saw it as simply another act of statecraft. Some might call this the culture of politics in the state capital, where Jack has held a seat in lower house for twelve years. Still, Laurel was dazed when the marriage ended, in the same way one is stunned when a graceless pickpocket murders his victim. Today her face is a map of tension. It is this look that forms the greatest resemblance to Nikki. She and Laurel were not just siblings, but novitiates of that common order — the Sisters of Worry.
Laurel’s two kids, Danny, fifteen, and his younger sister, Julie, wander in the hallway outside like the walking wounded, shell-shocked and numb, excluded from this family boneyard by the court’s Solomon-like wisdom. During Nikki’s illness and later, after her death, Laurel’s children have spent a good deal of time at my house. It has been a place to go while their mother is trying to get their lives together.
Laurel sits directly in front of me, just beyond the railing, at the counsel table.
‘The witness will answer the question,’ says Hastings. ‘Do you understand?’
Melanie nods.
‘Speak up,’ says the judge.
‘Yes.’
Melanie Vega is a woman who thrives in the eye of a storm, a personality that grows on animus like a reactor with its carbon rods removed. She gives the judge a smile, something between coy and confused, as if it were possible to forget Hemple’s last query — whether she was screwing Jack when he was still married to Laurel. The subtleties of Family Court. One of the reasons I do not practice here.
‘You don’t remember the question, Mrs. Vega?’ The judge looks down at her in the box.
She makes a face, a wan smile, like maybe with repetition it will get better.
‘Perhaps counsel can repeat it,’ says the judge.
Hemple nods, only too happy to oblige.
‘I asked you whether you had carnal relations with Jack Vega during the time that he was married to, and living with, Laurel Vega.’
With the term ‘carnal relations,’ Melanie’s eyebrows are half-way to the crown of her head. It is an expression that says it all, like leave it to lawyers to reserve the ‘f’ word for what they do to each other — and their own clients.
‘Carnal relations?’ she says.
‘Fine,’ says Hemple. ‘Sexual relations. Is that better?’
From Melanie’s perspective, a woman on the make with another lady’s husband, she’s not so sure.
‘I might have,’ she says.
‘Yes or no? Were you sleeping with the Petitioner while he was married and living with the Respondent?’ Hemple is tiring of the mind games.
A slight shrug, a concession by the witness. ‘What if we were? Consenting adults,’ she says. She looks up at the judge and smiles. Cute but still adultery.
Hemple moves squarely in front of the witness box, still far enough away not to be seen as coercive.
‘While you were doing all this consenting,’ she says, ‘with Mr. Vega — did you ever happen to do any of it at the Vega family home — maybe during periods when Laurel Vega was away?’
‘We might have. I didn’t keep a calendar,’ she says.
‘Might have?’
‘Once or twice,’ says Melanie. A grudging point. She looks the judge square in the eye, brazen, and shrugs as if to say, since his wife wasn’t using Jack’s bed, somebody else might as well.
All she gets back from Hastings are deep furrows above bushy eyebrows.
‘I see. So you were just doing your duty, servicing another woman’s husband?’
‘Objection.’ Jack’s lawyer is on his feet.
‘Withdrawn,’ says Hemple.
Hastings is shaking his head as if to say that having scored her point, Hemple is now screwing it up.
‘Then let me ask you another question,’ says Hemple. ‘Were the Vega children in the home when you were sleeping with their father — during the time their mother was away?’
Melanie’s eyes dart. She swallows a little saliva. She finally gets the point, but a little late. Hemple’s not interested in Melanie’s sexual conquests, but in Jack’s poor judgment as a father.
I look at Laurel, now sitting a little sideways in her chair, eyeing me for effect, to assess the impact of this latest dirt. I can guess where this information comes from. The kids have talked; Julie and Danny Vega. It is the single consolation for Laurel in an otherwise disastrous custody battle, that the children have taken their mother’s side in this brawl.
Their father, Jack, is of that political ilk from the southen part of the state who has lived for a decade like one of the barons of yore, members of a political class who believe they invented privilege and still hold the patent.
If money is the mother’s milk of politics, Jack has nursed his lips to a purple hue. According to election records he’s tickled the udders of various special interests for more than a half million dollars in the last six months. This is money no doubt he intends to put in his pocket. Term limits in this state now have politicians eating their elders. Jack must either run for Congress against another prince of patronage more encrusted with incumbency than himself or find another job. He now talks of ‘the people’ with acid bitterness for their stunted vision in derailing his gravy train. Now I hear he is making plans to peddle influence as a lobbyist in D.C., where many of his legislative cronies have gone, to the great political Valhalla on the Potomac.
What motivates Jack’s action here in court is not entirely clear. But then most legal family disputes are more a matter of venom than reason. He has unleashed a colony of highly paid investigators and therapists, like carpenter ants, to chew on the dry rot of Laurel’s character, to show that she is unfit to raise her own children. My own thinking is that Jack is at a crossroads. If he moves east he must either seize custody and take the children or continue to pay child support to Laurel. This has been drawing down his legislative paycheck in a major way, a terminal hemorrhage for a man who likes to drink lunch at the Sutter Club and vacation at Cabo San Lucas.
Several months ago Jack fell in arrears on support. Laurel, through her lawyer, brought contempt proceedings, and then stuck a lance a little deeper by sending copies of her legal papers to the media in Jack’s district. It was just before the last election, a press release with a suggested headline:
DEADBEAT LAWMAKER DITCHES FAMILY
In the end, Jack was forced to muster a loan from his political slush fund to come current, or go to jail. He won the election based on a handful of absentee ballots cast before Laurel punctured him with her journalist’s javelin.
But Jack has never been one to miss an opportunity for revenge. It came three months ago when Danny, who is fifteen, was picked up on juvenile charges that raised questions of parental neglect and seemed to undercut Laurel’s continued custody of the children. The kid was caught joyriding with three friends in a stolen car. One of the other boys had a juvenile record longer than Melanie’s face up on the stand.
‘It’s a simple question,’ says Hemple. ‘Did you sleep with Mr. Vega in the family home when the children were present?’
‘Well, they weren’t in the room,’ says Melanie. ‘I would have noticed.’
Laughter from the few courthouse groupies in the audience, and one reporter in the front row, a paper from Jack’s old district, getting the local angle.
The judge slaps his gavel on the bench and the laughter stops.
‘That’s not what I asked,’ says Hemple. ‘I asked you whether the children were in the house?’ There’s an edge to her voice this time.
‘I don’t know.’
‘You slept with the man in the family home and you don’t know whether the children were present in the house at the time?’
‘No.’
‘Well, who was watching the kids?’
‘Not me,’ says Melanie.
This brings more laughter, a smile from the bailiff whose eyes are glued to Melanie’s dress, something more sedate than her usual attire. I have seen her outside the courtroom in a red satin halter-top stretched tight as a drum at the bodice. Melanie Vega is not a big woman, except in the upper regions. I am told she works with weights to maintain this, a regimen that gives new meaning to the maxim ‘build it and they will come.’ She has the complexion of a ripe peach, clear, with the softness of film shot through silk gauze. She is the kind of woman for whom ‘blonde’ jokes were invented. At twenty-six, she is young enough to be Jack’s daughter. The two have been married now for five months, and Jack is starting to show a little wear. He keeps yawning in court, something that makes me think he and Melanie are doing things other than discussing courtroom strategy in the evenings.