The supreme court. My heart flips around several times. In the meantime, she looks off, not fully here.
"You know," Anna says then, "sometimes you do things you don't really understand. You just have to do them. Sense or no sense-it doesn't matter much."
This conversation intensifies a question I already ask myself all the time. What is wrong with a young woman, whom in almost every other regard I know to be gifted and refreshingly sane, that she would be interested in someone nearly twice her age, let alone somebody married? I have no illusion she would be drawn to me if every lawyer, judge, and flunky did not address me as "Chief" whenever I walk into the Central Branch Courthouse. But what does it mean to her to be sleeping with the chief? Something. I realize that. But I will probably never understand the secret part of her she hopes I might fill in. Who she wants to be in the law? Who she wishes her father was? The man she craves to be in her secret dreams? I don't know-nor, probably, does she. I sense only that she needs to get as close as possible, since whatever it is she seeks can only be absorbed skin to skin.
Here is what I have forgotten: the pain. I forgot that an affair is constant torment. Over the falseness at home. Over the anxiety we will be discovered. Over the suffering I know is coming at the inevitable end. Over the agony of waiting to be with her next. Over the fact that I am truly myself only for a few hours every several days in a hotel room, when those sweet moments, as close to heaven as we know on this earth, seem to make all the other anguish worthwhile.
I rarely sleep through the night and am up at three or four a.m. with a glass of brandy. I tell Barbara it is the court and the campaign that concern me. I sit in the dark and bargain with myself. I will meet Anna two more times. Then stop. But if I am going to stop, then why not stop now? Because I cannot. Because the day I give her up is the day I accept that this will never happen again. That I have, in a few words, begun to die.
Despite habitual precautions, I find myself growing somewhat cavalier about the dangers. They are ever-present, but when you go undetected two times, then four, then five, part of the extraordinary thrill becomes beating the odds. One day when Anna and I are meeting at the Gresham, Marco Cantu, a former copper I'd known when he was on the street, sees me sitting in the lobby with no apparent purpose and comes by to say hello. He now heads the hotel's security operation. Something about the way I tell him I am meeting a friend for lunch sounds wrong even to me. I therefore feel half electrocuted by panic a week later when, as we are headed down, the elevator doors open on an intervening floor to disclose Marco, who has the stature of a miniature sumo wrestler. It is a bad moment, Anna and I still nuzzling and splitting as the car stops, our movement surely visible to Marco.
"Chief! We're seein lots of you."
I do not introduce Anna and can feel Marco looking straight through me. The next week, I spot him as I'm coming into the hotel and pirouette to go back through the doors until he's vacated the lobby.
"Time to change the scene of the crime," I tell her as soon as I am safely in the room. "Marco was on the street a long time. He was lazy, but he had a great sense of smell."
Anna has undressed by now. She is in the fluffy hotel robe but has closed it not with the belt, but with a thick red satin ribbon tied in an elaborate gift bow.
"Is that how you think of it? A crime?"
"Anything that feels this good has to be wrong," I answer. I have hung up my jacket and am on the bed slipping off my shoes before I recognize that I was far too flip. She is staring.
"You could at least pretend to think about being with me."
"Anna-" But we both know she is close to the truth. I have spent no nights with her. On Friday of the third week, I told Barbara I was going to a bar function and dared to come home at one-thirty, even then having left the hotel with Anna begging me to stay. She talks often about somehow getting away for a weekend, waking up with each other and walking together in the open air. But I don't freely imagine us at large. I am fiercely attached, but to me our relationship belongs in the captive space of a rented room, where we can shed our clothes and grasp the different things we are each so desperate to obtain.
"Seriously. You'd never marry me, would you?"
"I'm taken."
"Duh. No. If Barbara wasn't in the picture? If she dropped dead. Or ran away?"
Why is my first instinct evasion? "I'm too poor for a trophy wife."
"There's a compliment."
"Anna, people would laugh in my face."
"And that's why? Because people will laugh?"
"Because there's a reason to laugh. A man married to a woman young enough to be his daughter is flying too close to the sun."
"I'd say that's my problem, wouldn't you? If I want to push you around in a wheelchair at high school graduation-"
"And change my Depends?"
"Whatever. Why can't I make those choices?"
"Because people usually have a hard time keeping deals where all the benefits are on the front end. They end up feeling sharp resentments later on."
She turns away. These conversations always bring her to tears. We are in a room today almost entirely consumed by the king bed. It looks out on the air shaft from which the clatter of the hotel kitchen rises.
"Anna, there is someone out there who will die to marry you."
"Well, he hasn't shown up yet. And don't tell me about somebody else. I don't want a consolation prize."
"I won't lie to you, Anna. I can't. I'm lying everywhere else. I have to tell you the truth. There's no reality to this. Am I supposed to change my campaign slogan? 'Vote for Sabich. He's on top of his staff.'"
She laughs out loud. Blessedly, her sense of humor never fails her. But her back is still to me.
"Anna, I would marry you if I was forty. I'm sixty."
"Stop telling me I'm young."
"I'm telling you I'm old."
"They're both pretty annoying. Look, you're not here by accident. You fuck me, then give me these speeches that imply you can't really take this seriously."
I turn her to me, bending very slightly so we are entirely eye to eye.
"Does that make sense to you? What you just said? That I don't take this seriously? I've risked everything to be with you," I say. "My career. My marriage. The respect of my son."
She breaks from my grasp, then abruptly faces me again, the green eyes intense.
"Do you love me, Rusty?"
It's the first time she's dared to ask, but I have known all along the question was coming.
"Yes," I say. From my lips, it feels very much like the truth.
She wipes an eye. And beams.
After the last encounter with Marco Cantu, our meeting places are governed by the whims of hotelrooms.com, where it always turns out one of several Center City establishments has space at the last minute at rock-bottom prices. Anna handles the bookings and e-mails me the locale, then arrives ten minutes before me to register, sending the room number to my handheld. We depart at the same ten-minute intervals.
And so I am on my way out of the Renaissance on a splendid spring day, with a clean sky and the smell of everything opening, when I hear a voice, more or less familiar.
"Ah, Judge," it says. When I pivot, Harnason is there. It is an awful moment. I realize at once he followed me here two hours ago and has been waiting like a faithful dog tethered to a lamppost. How much does he know? How many times has he trailed me? As happens so often these days, I am nearly knocked to my knees by the magnitude of my stupidity.
"Imagine meeting you," he says without a hint of sincerity, so I know my guess is right. I beg my heart to settle down while I calculate what he could have possibly observed. He knows I go to hotels at lunchtime, that I sometimes stay too long for a normal midday meal. But that's all he's seen. If he was on my heels, he would not have caught sight of Anna arriving ten minutes before me.