And so, as if it signifies nothing at all, she drops her head against my chest and I eventually wrap my arm around her. We say nothing, not a word, for minutes, but we do not change positions, my hand now tight on her firm shoulder and her fine hair, sweet with the applications of conditioners and shampoo, resting right above my heart. There is no need to voice what is being debated. The longing and the attachment are fierce. But the perils and the pointlessness are plain. We are curled together, each trying to determine which loss would be worse-going forward or turning away. I still have no idea what will happen. But in this moment I learn one thing: I have been lying to myself for months. Because I am fully willing.
And so I sit there thinking, Will it happen, will it actually happen, how can it, how can it not, how can it? It is like the moment when the jury foreman stands with the folded verdict form in his hand. Life will change. Life will be different. The words cannot be spoken quickly enough.
In my moments given to this fantasy, I have promised myself the decision will be only hers. I will not ask or make advances. And so I hold her to me now, but do no more. The feeling of her solid form arouses me naturally, but I merely wait, and the time goes on and on, perhaps twenty minutes in total, until eventually I feel her face turn up to me from within the crook of my arm and the warmth of her breath on my neck. Now, she is waiting. Poised. I feel her there. I do not think No or even Wait. Instead, this is my thought: Never again. If not now, then never again. Never again the chance to embrace the most fundamental excitement in life.
And so I look down to her. Our lips meet, our tongues. I groan out loud, and she whispers, "Rusty, oh, Rusty." I find the exquisite softness of the breast that I have imagined in my hand a thousand times. She pulls away to see me, and I view her, beautiful, serene, and utterly without a second thought. And then she speaks the words that elevate my soul. This daring, gorgeous young woman says, "Kiss me again."
Afterward, she drives me to the bus and near the station veers into an alley so we can kiss good-bye.
Me! my heart screams, Chief Sabich, smooching like a seventeen-year-old in the shadows beyond the cone of light from the streetlamp.
"When will I see you?" she asks.
"Oh, Anna."
"Please," she says. "Not just once. I would feel so slutty." She stops. "Sluttier."
I know there will never be a sweeter moment than the one we had just had. Less inept, but never more exultant.
"All affairs end badly," I say. I am perhaps the world's leading exhibit. Tried for murder. "We both should think about this."
"We both have," she answers. "I could see you thinking every time you looked at me for months. Please. So we can talk, if nothing else?"
We both know that the only talk will occur between the acts, but I nod and then alight after kissing her deeply again. Her car, an aged Subaru, goes off with the phlegmy sound of a failing muffler. I walk slowly to the bus. How, my heart shrieks, how can I be doing this again? How can any human being make another time the same mistake that all but ruined his life? Knowing the likelihood of one more catastrophe? I ask myself these questions with every step. But the answer is always the same: Because what has lain between then and now-because that time is not fully deserving of being called living.
CHAPTER 6
Tommy, October 13, 2008
Jim Brand applied to the PA's office out of the bottom of his night law school class and received a form rejection. But he showed up in the reception area to beg for an interview, and Tommy, passing by, liked what he saw. It was Tommy who pushed Brand through the hiring committee, taught him how to write a decent brief, made Jim the puppy lawyer on a number of big cases. And Brand, in time, proved out. He had a natural feeling for the courtroom, with the instincts of a jock who knew when there was trouble on his blind side. Defense lawyers lamented his smash-mouth style, but they said that about Tommy, too.
But unlike most people you do a favor, Jim Brand never forgot who he owed. Tommy was his big brother. They had been best men at each other's weddings. Even now, once a month, at least, Tommy and Brand had lunch by themselves, both as a way to keep up with each other and to noodle on the office's recurring problems, which were otherwise easily ignored in the onrush of emergencies. Usually they had a quick sandwich nearby, but today Brand left a message with the secretaries for Tommy to meet him downstairs at noon. Jim was just nosing his Mercedes out of the concrete parking structure abutting the County Building and the courthouse when Tommy got to the street.
"Where to?" Tommy asked from the passenger seat. Brand loved this car, a 2006 E-Class that he'd bought cheap after a three-month quest involving constant conversations about what he'd turned up on the Internet or in want ads. He and his girls polished it every Sunday, and he'd found a leather cleaner that gave the vehicle that new-car smell. The auto was so pristine, Tommy was not comfortable even crossing his legs, for fear his shoes might leave dust on the seat cushion. About the happiest day of Brand's life came when he was pulling out one evening and some toothless wino teetered by and said, 'Hey, man, that's some slick sled.' Brand still repeated the line all the time.
"I was thinking Giaccolone's," said Brand.
"Oh, God." At Giaccolone's they stuck an entire veal cutlet in an Italian roll and buried it in marinara. As a young PA, Tommy would take the dicks who'd worked on a case over there whenever a jury went out, but these days one sandwich was an entire week's calorie count. "I'm gonna feel like a boa constrictor trying to digest a horse."
"You're going to enjoy lunch," said Brand, which was the first clue Tommy had that something was up.
Giaccolone's was not very far from the U, and the famine appetites of undergraduates had sustained the place years ago, when it required youthful bravado or armed companions to enter the neighborhood. Back then it was a mess around here. The playground across the street was a weed-choked empty lot, with purple thistles growing beside refuse dumped in the middle of the night-worn wheel drums and chunks of stressed concrete with the rusty rebar sticking out. Now there were sleek town houses over there, and Tony Giaccolone, the third generation in the business, had done the unthinkable and added salads to the huge menu that hung over the counter. The U Medical Center, whose free-form architectural style resembled a bunch of Tomaso's blocks dumped on the floor, had crept within a few hundred yards, morphing and expanding like one of the cancers they were famous for treating there.
Around the back of Giaccolone's there were concrete picnic tables. With their sandwiches, each dense as a brick, Brand and Tommy headed that way. A copper-colored Buddha in a suit sprang to his feet as they approached.
"Hey there," said Brand. "Boss, you remember Marco Cantu, right? Marco, you know the PA."
"Hey, Tom." Cantu wound up and smashed his hand into Tommy's. In Marco's days on the force, he had been known as No Cantu, smart enough but legendary lazy, the kind of cop who proved they shouldn't have put air-conditioning in the cruisers, because in the summer Marco wouldn't get out even to stop a murder. He had landed on his feet somewhere, though. Tommy remembered that much. Put in his twenty, then rode the diversity wave into paradise.
"Veep for security at the Gresham," said Cantu when Tommy asked what he was up to these days. The Gresham was a classic hotel, built around a magnificent lobby where the marble pillars rose tall as sequoias. Tommy was over there now and then for bar association functions, but you needed a corporate expense account to pay for the rooms.
"That must be a tough gig," said Molto. "Once a month, you go into crisis mode when you need to whisper to some drunken executive that it's time to leave the bar."