"Nobody is going to take a picture of you, Barbara."
"If your ads are on TV, everybody will be watching me. Wife of a candidate for supreme court justice? It's like being a minister's spouse. It's bad enough as it is with you as chief judge. But now I'm really going to have to play the part."
There is no talking her out of this vague paranoia; I have tried for decades. Instead, I am struck by her remark about playing a part. We do not often get to this point, where the terms under which our marriage resumed are forced into the open. Nat was our mutual priority. After that, I have been entitled to remake my life as best I can with no deference to her. But because I accept that order as morally correct, I do not think often of how that must feel to Barbara-an unending penance as a drug-controlled Stepford wife.
"I'm sorry," I say. "You're right. I should have talked to you."
"But you wouldn't have thought about it, would you?"
"I just apologized, Barbara."
"No, no matter what it means to me, you really wouldn't have thought about letting N.J. become chief."
"Barbara, I can't consider whether or not my wife is"-I visibly reach for words, so we both know what has been rejected: 'mentally unbalanced,' 'bipolar,' 'nuts'-"publicity shy in making professional decisions. N.J. would damage the court enormously as chief. I put my own self-interest aside. I can hardly place more weight on yours."
"Because you're Rusty the paragon. Saint Rusty. You always need to run a steeplechase before you can let yourself have what you want. I'm sick of this."
You're sick, I nearly say. But I stop myself. I always stop myself. She will rage now, and I will just absorb it, thinking as a mantra, She's crazy, you know she's crazy, let her be crazy.
And so it goes. She works herself into a greater fury with each moment. I take a chair and say next to nothing except to repeat her name from time to time. She leaves the bed and resembles a boxer, pacing as if she were in the ring, fists clenched but hurling invective instead of punches. I am thoughtless, cold, self-absorbed, and unconcerned about her. In time, I go to the medicine cabinet to locate the Stelazine. I show her the pill and wait to see if she will take it before she enters the final, destructive phase in which she will lay ruin to something more or less precious to me. In the past, right in front of me, she has smashed the crystal bookends I was given by the bar association when I was elevated to chief judge; immolated my tuxedo trousers with the fire flick we use to light the barbecue; and thrown into the toilet two Cubans I had been given by Judge Doyle. Tonight, she finds the box George gave me, removes my gift, and right in front of me scissors the epaulets off the shoulders of the robe.
"Barbara!" I scream, yet do not stand to stop her. My outburst, or her act, is enough to reel her back a bit, and she snatches the pill off her bedside table and downs it. In half an hour, she will be in a druggy coma that will cause her to sleep most of tomorrow. There will be no apology. A day or two from now, we will be back to where we started. Distant. Careful. Disconnected. With months of peace ahead before the next eruption.
I find my way to the sofa in my study outside the bedroom. A pillow, sheet, and blanket are stored there for these occasions. Barbara's rages always shake me, since sooner or later I look down through a tunnel in time to the crime twenty-one years ago, wondering what madness made me think we could go on.
I have a Scotch in the kitchen. When I became a lawyer, I had no use for alcohol. At this age, I drink too much, rarely to excess but seldom heading off to bed without first administering some liquid anesthesia. In the john, I empty my bladder for the last time and hold there. At certain times of year, the moon shines directly through this bathroom skylight. As I stand in the magic glow, the memory of Anna's physical presence returns, potent as the melody of a favorite song. I recall my wife's remark about my difficulties in letting myself have what I want, and almost in reprisal I release myself to the sensation, not merely the movie of Anna and me locked in embrace, but the languor and exhilaration of escaping the restraint on which I've staked my life for decades.
I linger there, until, with time, I recede to the present, until my mind takes over from my senses and begins a lawyerly interrogation of myself. The Declaration of Independence said we have a right to pursue happiness-but not to find it. Children die in Darfur. In America, men dig ditches. I have power, meaningful work, a son who loves me, three squares every day, and a house with air-conditioning. Why am I entitled to more?
I return to the kitchen for another drink, then make my bed on the leather sofa. The liquor has done its job, and I am drifting into the dust of sleep. And so concludes the day commemorating my sixty years on earth, with the feeling of Anna's lips lightly on mine and my brain cycling through the eternal questions. Can I ever be happy? Can I truly lie down to die without trying to find out?
The role of judge and clerk is largely unique in contemporary professional life, because a law clerk is basically engaged in an apprenticeship. They come to me brilliant but unmolded, and I spend two years showing them nothing less than how to reason about legal problems. I was a clerk myself thirty-five years ago, to the chief justice of the state supreme court, Philip Goldenstein. Like most law clerks, I still worship my judge. Phil Goldenstein was one of those people called to public life by his passionate faith in humanity, believing that good lurked in every soul and that his job as a politician or a judge was merely to help let it out. That is the sentimental faith of another era and certainly, if I have to be blunt, not one I ever took up. But my clerkship was a glorious experience nonetheless, because Phil became the first person to see great things for me as an attorney. I viewed the law as a palace of light, whose radiance would erase the mean and crabbed darkness of my parents' home. Being accepted in that realm meant my soul had exceeded the tiny boundaries for which I had always feared I was destined.
I'm not sure I've been able to follow the justice's generous example with my clerks. My father never gave me a model of gentle authority, and I probably draw back too often and come off as officious and self-impressed. But a judge's clerks are his heirs in the law, and I have a special attachment to many of them. The seven former clerks who attend Anna's party Friday night are among my favorites, all of them notable successes in the profession. They join the rest of my staff to make a jolly table of fifteen in a dark back room at the Matchbook. We all drink too much wine and gently roast Anna, who is ribbed about her constant dieting, her laments over single life, her sneaking of occasional cigarettes, and the way she turns a suit into casual attire. One person has bought her bedroom slippers to wear in the office.
When the event is over, Anna drives me back to the courthouse, as we planned. I'm going to get my briefcase, and she will box up the last of her belongings, then drop me at the Nearing bus. Instead, it turns out that each of us has bought the other a small gift. I sit on my old sofa, whose cracked leather inevitably reminds me a little of my own face, in order to open the box. It holds a miniature scale of justice, which Anna has had engraved: "To the Chief-Love and gratitude forever, Anna"
"Lovely," I say, then she sets herself down beside me with the small package I have given her.
Distance. Closeness. The words are not merely metaphors. We walk down the street nearer to the persons with whom we are connected. And in the last months of Anna's clerkship, a professional distance has largely vanished between us. When we get into an elevator, she inevitably crowds right in front of me. 'Oops,' she will say as she wedges her rump against me, looking over her shoulder to laugh. And of course, now she sits flank to flank, shoulder to shoulder, not an angstrom between us. The sight of my present-a pen set for her desk and a note invoking Phil Goldenstein, telling her she is destined for great things-brings her to tears. "You mean so much to me, Judge," she says.