"Not yet," said Tommy. "After the election we can look at all of this again."
Brand was frowning.
"Not yet," Tommy repeated.
CHAPTER 9
Rusty, May 2007
What is great sex? Does it have to be prolonged? Or inventive? Are circus maneuvers required? Or merely intensity? By whatever measure, my bouts with Anna are not the greatest of my life-that title will forever rest with Carolyn Polhemus, for whom sex on each occasion was a shameless conquest of the most extreme altitudes of physical pleasure and lack of inhibition.
Anna is of a generation for many of whom sex is first and foremost fun. When I knock on the hotel room door ten minutes behind her, there is often an amusing surprise: A nurse in six-inch come-fuck-me heels. Her torso wrapped in Saran. A green arrow in body paint that plunges between her breasts and joins a V immediately above the female cleft. The gift bow tying her robe, beneath which she was naked. But the humor sometimes implies a lack of consequence I never feel.
She is, of course, far more experienced than I. Anna is the fourth woman I have slept with in the last forty years. Her "number," as she blithely refers to it, is never disclosed, but she mentions enough in passing that I know my predecessors are many. I am concerned, therefore, when it develops that she has trouble reaching climax. With apologies to Tolstoy, I would say that all men come alike, but each woman arrives at orgasm her own way-and Anna's way often eludes me. There are days when I have my own problems, finally leading me to call on my doctor for the little blue pill he's often offered.
But for all that might, at moments, seem to make Anna and me candidates for an instructional video, there is an inescapable and wondrous tenderness every time we are together. I touch her the way you would a holy relic-adoringly, lingering with the certainty that my yearning and my gratitude are radiating from my skin. And we have the one thing that great lovemaking always requires-in our best moments, nothing else exists. My shame or anxiety, the cases that vex me, my concerns about the court and the campaign-she is the only thing in the known universe. It is a beautiful, perfect oblivion.
No matter how much Anna insists that we should not consider our ages, the difference is there constantly, especially in the gap it creates in our communications. I have never held an iPod, and I do not know whether it is good or bad when she says that something "kills." And she has no clue about the world that made me, no memories of Kennedy's assassination or life under Eisenhower-not to mention the sixties. The great fusion of love, the sense that she is I and I she, is sometimes subject to question.
It also means that I talk too often about Nat. I cannot resist asking Anna's assistance, as someone who is far closer to him in life.
"You worry too much about him," she tells me one night as we are lying in each other's arms between bouts. Room service will knock soon with dinner. "I know a lot of people who went to law school with him at Easton and they all say he's brilliant-you know, one of those people who talk in class only once a month and then say something even the professor never thought of."
"He's had a hard time. There's a lot going on with Nat," I say.
Because you love your children, and make their contentment the principal object of your existence, it's something of a downer to see them turn out not much happier than you. Nathaniel Sabich was a good kid by most common measures. He paid attention in grade school, he dissed his parents with relative infrequency. But he had an uncommonly hard time growing up. He was a rambunctious little boy, who had trouble sitting still and paged ahead to see the end when I was reading him a story. As he grew older, it became plain that all the random motion had its source in a kind of worry he took deeper and deeper into himself.
The therapists have had no end of theories why. He is the only child of two only children and came up in a hothouse of parental attention that may well prove there is such a thing as loving a child too much. Then there was the trauma of my indictment and trial, when no matter how we pretended, our family dangled like a movie character clinging to a broken bridge.
The explanation I go to most often is the one that leaves me least to blame: He inherited some of his mother's depressive disorder. By the time he had reached adolescence, I could see the familiar black funk descend on him, marked by the same brooding and isolation. We went through all the stuff you would expect. Report cards marked by A pluses and F's. Drugs. It was perhaps the most shamed day of my life when my pal Dan Lipranzer, a detective who was on the eve of his retirement to Arizona, popped into my chambers unexpectedly a decade ago. 'Drug Task Force picked up a drippy-nosed kid who goes to Nearing High yesterday and he says he's buying his poppers from the son of a judge.'
The good news was that this development allowed us to leverage Nat back into psychotherapy. When he began on SSRIs near the end of college, it was as if he had left a cave and come into the light. He started grad school in philosophy, finally moving out of the house for good, and then, with no discussion with us, made the change to law school. My son has been the living receptacle of so much anxiety and longing for both Barbara and me that we each seem startled at times that he is finally making his way on his own, but that probably has to do with the uneasiness of being left face-to-face with each other.
"Were you happy he went to law school?" Anna asks.
"Relieved in a way. I didn't mind grad school in philosophy. I thought it was a worthy enterprise. But I didn't know where it was going to lead. Not that law school made it much better. He talks about being a law professor, but it's going to be hard for him to do that straight from a clerkship, and he doesn't seem to have other ideas."
"How about a J. Crew model? You realize the guy's gorgeous, don't you?"
Nat is lucky enough to resemble his mother, yet the truth, which only I seem to recognize, is that the piercing quality to his handsomeness, the acute blue eyes and the universe of somber mystery, comes straight from my father. Young women are drawn like a beacon by Nat's exceptional good looks, but he has always been unnaturally slow to form a bond and has entered yet another remote phase as the result of a disastrous breakup with Kat, the girl he saw the last four years.
"They offered him a job. Somebody from an agency saw him on the street. But he's always hated people talking about his looks. It's not the basis he wants to be judged on. Besides, there's a better career if he wants to make easy money."
"What's that?"
"Everybody your age. You can all be rich beyond your wildest dreams."
"How?"
"Learn to remove tattoos."
She laughs as Anna laughs, as if laughing is all there is to life. She squirms and giggles. But the talk of Nat has left something lingering with her, and she rises to an elbow a few minutes later to see me.
"Did you ever want a daughter?" she asks.
I stare for quite some time. "I think that's the kind of remark that Nat would have called 'deliberately transgressive' in his grad school days."
"You mean out of bounds?"
"I think that's what he means."
"I don't think boundaries cut a lot of ice around here," she says, and nods to the walls of the hotel room. "Did you? Want a daughter?"
"I wanted to have more children. Barbara had all kinds of excuses: She could never love another child as much as Nat. Stuff like that. In retrospect, I think she knew she was sick. And fragile."
"But did you want a daughter?"
"I already had a son."
"So yes?"
I try to cast my mind back to the yearnings of those years. I wanted children, to be a father, to do better than was done to me-it was a dominating passion.
"I suppose," I answer.
She stands and slowly sheds the robe she has put on for warmth, letting it fall from her shoulders as she fixes me with a longing gaze I used to see in her last days working in my chambers.