Tommy groaned and quoted Machiavelli, an Italian who knew what was what. "If you shoot at the king, you better kill the king."
But Brand was shaking his big bald head.
"Assume the worst, Boss, assume it's a dry hole. Rusty'll be pissed when he finds out, maybe he pokes us in the eye now and then, but he's not going anywhere to complain. He's on the supreme court, he didn't get hurt, and he's not advertising that once upon a time, while his missus was still breathing, he had a girlfriend. He'll just hate your guts a little more than he hates your guts already."
"Great."
"We got a job, Boss. We got some information."
"Half-ass information."
"Half-ass or not, we have to run it out. You want some Nearing copper crying in a reporter's beer six months from now about how they turned up some good shit on the new justice before he got elected and you needed a heart transplant because you didn't want big bad Rusty to paddle your ass again? That's not good either."
Brand was right. They had a job to do. But it was a peril. The joke was thinking you were ever really in charge of your life. You pressed your oar down into the water to direct the canoe, but it was the current that shot you through the rapids. You just hung on and hoped not to hit a rock or a whirlpool.
Tommy waited all the way back to the courthouse before he gave Brand permission to proceed.
CHAPTER 7
Rusty, March-April 2007
Four days after becoming lovers, Anna and I meet again at the Hotel Gresham. Her place is out. Her roommate, Stiles, arrives unpredictably. More to the point, her East Bank development of redbrick midrises is only two blocks from the state supreme court, where Nat is already putting in a few hours each week.
Appearances being paramount, we have agreed through several cryptic e-mails that she will put her credit card down for the hotel room. I sit in the lobby, pretending I am awaiting someone else. When the registration clerk turns away, Anna's eyes find mine. I slip my hand inside my jacket and touch my heart.
When you have looked at a woman for months with the imagination's desiring eye, a part of you cannot accept that it's really her naked in your arms. And to some extent, it isn't. Her waist is narrower than I'd realized, the thighs a trifle heavier. Yet the essence of the thrill is having jumped the wall into my fantasies, an experience as otherworldly as crawling between the bars and romping with the jungle animals in the zoo. At last, I think, when I touch her. At last.
Afterward, as she works the tail of her blouse back into her skirt, I say, "So this actually happened."
Her smile is blissful, innocent. When Anna enjoys something, she feels no self-consciousness.
"You didn't want to, did you? I could feel you weighing this every time I stepped into the room. And deciding not to."
"I didn't want to," I say. "But I'm here."
"I only think about something once," she tells me. "And then I decide. It's a gift. About three months ago I realized I wanted to sleep with you."
"And you're like the Mounties, right? Always get your man?"
She smiles, smiles for all the world. "I'm like the Mounties," she says.
In my chambers, at campaign events, as I walk down the street or ride the bus, I go through the gestures of a normal life, but inwardly I've moved to a new location. I think of Anna constantly, obsessively reviewing the incremental steps we took over the months on our way to becoming lovers, still stunned to have escaped the hard limits I'd fixed on my existence. At home, I have no impulse to sleep, not merely because I am reluctant to lie down beside Barbara, but because more vitality has entered my body in the last week than I have experienced in decades. And without the display case glass behind which every female but my wife has reposed safely for a generation, there is a tactile thrill in the presence of virtually any woman.
Yet I know at all moments that what I am doing is in every colloquial sense insane. Powerful middle-aged man, beautiful younger woman. The plot scores zero for originality and is deservedly the object of universal scorn, including my own. My first affair-twenty-plus years ago-left me so racked by conflict that I started seeing a shrink. But I have no thought now of finding another therapist, which has been a loose agenda item for years, because I don't need someone else's advice to know this is simply crazy, hedonistic, nihilistic, and that most important "istic"-unreal. It must stop.
For Anna, discovery would be nowhere as cataclysmic as for me. It would make for an embarrassing start to her career. But she would never shoulder most of the blame. She has no wife to whom she's vowed fidelity, no continuing public responsibilities. At the court, the fact that we restrained ourselves until she was no longer employed might save my position, but N. J. Koll would become the instant favorite in our contest.
And those would be the least of the costs. Barbara's rage is lethal and at this stage is most likely to make her a danger to herself. But by far the worst would be facing Nat and his new look, empty of any respect.
One revelation of my first affair was that I carry around a lot of baggage from the dark, unhappy home in which I was raised. Until then, I had naively thought I was Joe College or Beaver Cleaver, someone who had been able to convert himself, the son of a sadistic war survivor and an eccentric recluse, into a better-than-average normal American guy. I still yearn in some ways to be a paragon, master of an elusive regularity. But I am haunted by the shadow who knows I am not. No one is. I know that, too. But I am far more concerned by my shortcomings than anybody else's. Vice has that attraction. It means embracing who I am.
Anna is like many people I knew in law school, not intellectual but brilliant, so agile with the lawyer's tasks of mating fact and law that it is as thrilling as watching a great athlete on the playing field. Now suddenly peer to peer, I find her brightness engaging at an elemental level. But our conversations involve little sweetness or murmuring. It is lawyer to lawyer, almost always a debate, half-amused, but never without an edge. And what we debate is a truth that had to be clear to both of us from the start: This cannot possibly end well. She will meet someone better suited to her. Or we will be discovered and my life again will lie in smoking ruins. Either way, there is no future.
"Why not?" she asks when I say that casually on the second afternoon.
"I can't leave Barbara. For one thing, my son would never forgive me. And for the second, it's unfair." I explain some of the history, even detailing the pharmacopeia in Barbara's medicine cabinet as a way to make a point: My wife is damaged goods. I took her back knowing that.
Anna's look flutters somewhere between sullen and hurt, and she flushes.
"Anna, you understood this. You had to understand this."
"I don't know what I understood. I just needed to be with you." Tears are crawling down her bright cheeks.
"Here's the problem," I say to her. "There is a fundamental difference between us."
"Age, you mean? You're a man. And I'm a woman. I don't think about age."
"You're supposed to. You're starting and I'm ending. Have you noticed that men my age lose their hair. And that it starts growing from their ears. That their guts soften. What do you think that's about?"
She made a face. "Hormones?"
"No, what would Darwin say? Why is it advantageous for the old men to look different from the young men? So the fertile young women can see who they should be mating with. So some lounge lizard my age can't get away with telling you he's twenty years younger."
"You're not a lounge lizard. And I'm not a bimbo." Offended, she throws back the covers and stalks, in naked glory, to the desk for a cigarette. I had never seen her light up before and was a trifle taken aback that she booked a smoking room. I kicked when I left the reserves, but I have never stopped finding in the smell of a burning cigarette the aroma of blind indulgence. "What do you think?" she asks. "This is just an experience for me?"