I hope you don’t mind too much me unloading about all of this. I know one of your best friends was gay. Didn’t he move to Atlanta? I hope you are making sure Jessie is getting enough exercise.
Say hello to Amy. Dad, is she even thirty?
Love, Sarah, Your Squishy-soft Daughter I lean back in my chair and stare out my window.
Sarah, a carbon copy of her mother, stays on high boil. But no wonder she can’t go into that guy’s room without her eyes watering: My mother used to say sarcastically that I wouldn’t even drink after myself.
Since I never washed a dish until I was married, it wasn’t always said in good humor. I reread the letter. What a kid. Last semester she was a
raging feminist; now, she’s visiting the sick. A work in progress if there ever was one.
I pick up the phone and call her room. Amazingly, she is there.
“Why aren’t you in class?” I ask when she answers the phone.
“I’m just leaving,” she says in the same breathless tone I’d hear when she was scurrying around at the last minute about to be late for high school. How did we cope in those years after her mother died? Between us, we had a hard time figuring out how to use the electric can opener.
We managed, though. Despite some craziness on my part, those years forged a bond between us that will never be broken.
“I got your letter, babe,” I say, knowing it won’t do any good to preach.
“I’m proud of you for doing this, but be careful. You’re not around his blood or anything, are you?” I ask, wanting reassurance she is safe.
“Dad,” she says, her voice impatient, “we’re not nurses. Besides, I can’t even thread a needle, much less give anyone a shot.”
I laugh. Poor kid. What did I teach her? Not much. But I didn’t ruin her either.
“Are you sure this stuff isn’t a little too heavy? College is supposed to be fun.”
“Dad, it’s so sad! They’re either sick or terrified they’re getting sick.”
Sarah doesn’t always listen to every word I say.
I want to ask how these guys got AIDS, but I’m afraid I’d get more of a description than I want from my daughter.
“Maybe it would be better if you were just doing this in the summer.”
“Luke won’t be here this summer,” Sarah says coldly.
“Dad, I’ll have to call you. I’m late. Bye.”
“Bye,” I say before the phone clicks in my ear.
I put the receiver down hoping she won’t get too caught up in this latest obsession.
I go out to the front to go take a leak, and Julia tells me I have a walk-in. I check my watch and decide I can squeeze somebody in before I have to leave. I try to schedule appointments for everyone, but I’ve learned the hard way that some people would sooner eat broken glass for breakfast than agree to talk to me at my convenience.
“Mr. Longley says he’s got a personal injury case,” Julia whispers respectfully as I nod at the big man in the corner who is already scrambling to his feet.
“He says he has to talk to you immediately.”
At the public defender’s office we had the luxury of telling people they actually had to wait their turn. In private practice I can measure the month’s take by what lengths I’ll go to in order to accommodate a client. Usually, I won’t risk asking a client to let me go to the bathroom first. He might be gone when I got out.
Eager as I am, he walks over to me and extends his hand.
“Glenn Longley,” he says. Is this a client or a life insurance salesman?
“Gideon Page,” I say, sizing him up. If he was injured, he has made a nice recovery. The guy is undeniably handsome and looks in peak condition.
About forty-five, he looks like the former pitcher Jim Palmer, though the only image I can now summon of that Baltimore great is the man in his underwear. What people won’t do for money!
The way things are going on TV, pretty soon we’ll see Palmer slipping his briefs down to his knees and demonstrating how to put on a rubber.
“You got that Razorback football player off,” he informs me.
“That’s how I got your name.”
“The jury acquitted him,” I say, politely.
In my office Longley gets right to the point.
Neatly dressed in a suit patterned in slate and black mini-tooth that looks one hundred percent wool, he perches on the edge of the chair across from my desk and says, “My wife ran off with another man, and I want to sue the bastard.”
I wince, explaining, “The Arkansas legislature abolished the suit of alienation of affection a few years ago. There’s no cause of action in this state any longer.”
Longley almost bounces out of his chair.
“You mean a man can steal my wife,” he thunders, “and I can’t even get a dime?”
“I’m afraid not.” Woman as property-obviously a concept still alive in our hearts if no longer on the books. Damn. On the witness stand, as good as Longley looks, this guy would have gotten some female juices flowing in the jury box. Still, I wonder what he did to run his wife off. In this day and age, women aren’t exactly tied to a slake in the bedroom to await their husband’s return. The longer I think about it, the more obnoxious the notion of a suit for alienation of affection becomes. The law, in its infinite wisdom, turned what should have been a consensual relationship between two people into a legal monopoly.
Good for the legislature. It gets blamed for everything bad that happens in the state, but rarely gets credit for anything positive. But probably there was more to it than a mild outbreak of feminism. It’s not unlikely that some of the members were afflicted by a “there but for the grace of God go I” mentality. I know the feeling. Less than a month after Rosa died I found myself being consoled in a motel by her best friend. This
grief-induced madness could have, in theory, brought on a lawsuit by the innocent husband, but the real villain of the piece was the Grim Reaper, and, so far as I know, no lawyer has ever figured out a way to have the last word in that conversation.
Longley’s face is mottled with rage.
“I’ll go to the prosecutor then and have the motherfacker put in jail.”
I sigh. The only thing that is entirely predictable in human history is that the messenger always gets it in the neck.
“Adultery,” I tell him as gently as possible, “isn’t a crime in Arkansas.”
Longley shoots up out of his chair and looms over me.
“What in the hell are you lawyers good for?”
I roll my chair back against the wall. Longley is too handsome to be a philosopher, but I have a weakness for purely rhetorical questions, myself.
“The jury’s still out on that one,” I concede.
His chin high, Longley marches righteously to my door sill but once there smartly executes an about face.
“Do you know what lawyers and sperm have in common?”
Actually, Julia, purporting to quote the wisdom of Rush Umbaugh, informed me yesterday, but feigned innocence may be the only way to get rid of Mr. Longley.
“No, what?” I ask.
Mr. Longley’s sickly expression convinces me that his wife made the right decision.
“Only about one in a million,” he shrieks, “ever grow to be a human being!”
Afraid to laugh for fear I may encourage him to launch into a morning’s worth of lawyer jokes, I stare reverently at his chin as if I were contemplating one of the great scientific discoveries of the century.
God only knows what he thinks is really going through my brain, but after a brief silence, he wheels again and is gone. Nonplussed, I shrug. We lawyers are supposed to play the role of verbal hit men in our society. When the rules, in their quirkiness, forbid this part of licensed character assassins to us, it frustrates the hell out of Americans. Dan, who, after a couple of drinks, enjoys woolgathering on these matters, claims that TV violence, which includes pro sports like hockey, football, and basketball, provide surrogate physical expressions of our hostile national character, and attorneys are merely the intellectual equivalent of a generalized aggression.