Who was I then? Who am I now?
“I’m Lisa Fremont,” she said to the mirror, extending her right hand to an imaginary interviewer.
“Ah yes, Ms. Fremont,” dropping her voice to a masculine timbre. “I’ve reviewed your curriculum vitae, and I must say, you have an impressive background.”
She laughed. “You don’t know the half of it, Justice Truitt.”
She gave good interview-top of the class, a first-rate law review note on the right of privacy, and street-smarts that her Ivy League competitors couldn’t match-so why was she so nervous? Another interview came back to her. In her last semester at Stanford, she had applied to one of San Francisco’s largest and stuffiest law firms. She’d gone to lunch with the senior partner and two young male associates-all suspenders, cuff links, and pearly California teeth. They were at the Big Four, a mahogany mausoleum honoring four railroad tycoons, a place so masculine that testosterone replaces the vermouth in the martinis. The old coot was rambling on about the glory of representing insurance companies, banks, and manufacturers with an unfortunate predilection-his lawyerly term-for producing exploding tires, collapsing ladders, and toxic pharmaceuticals. She listened politely, ignoring the two boy-toy lawyers whose leers suggested they couldn’t wait to bend her over a stack of Corpus Juris Secundum. She wasn’t halfway through her Dungeness crab cocktail when the boss patted his worsted wool suit pocket and turned to her apologetically. “It appears I’ve left your curriculum vitae in the office. Could you orally refresh me?”
The two associates snorted vichyssoise up their nasal cavities, faces turning the same color as their power burgundy ties.
“No,” Lisa answered, politely, “but I have a couple of girlfriends who’d love to.”
She didn’t want the job, anyway. Or rather, Max didn’t want her to have the job. He was already talking about the court of appeals job, a great stepping stone to clerking for the Supremes.
Lisa Fremont, clerk on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. That had seemed like the top of the world. But now, this…
After a year clerking on the appeals court, she applied for a job with Samuel Adams Truitt, the newest Justice on the Supreme Court, whose vote Max’s lawyers said they needed if they were to win. Neither Max nor his deep-carpet mouthpieces could help her now. To be a law clerk on the Supreme Court of the United States, you had to earn it.
She studied herself in the mirror. She had long legs with more than a hint of muscle in the calves, a legacy of the dancing. Her stomach was flat and her bottom tight, countess squats in the gym compensating for sitting on her ass the last twelve months in the chambers of Judge Mary Alice O’Brien, a sixty-six-year-old Reagan appointee who sipped bourbon during recess.
Still looking in the mirror, Lisa arched her back and stood, hip shot, an old pose from the club. Her firm, high breasts were too small for her prior line of work, Lisa had thought, until Sheila, the mother hen and oldest stripper, told her, “It ain’t what you got, honey, it’s what you do with what you got.”
From the Tiki Club to the Supreme Court. One small step for a woman, one giant leap for a stripper.
Now, she put on her makeup, a light foundation that covered the sprinkling of freckles across her narrow nose. Her cheekbones, already strong, took on new contours with a light dusting of blush. An almost invisible application of mauve eye shadow and a coral lipstick followed. She’d already blow-dried her short, reddish blonde hair that, like her eyes, changed color in different surroundings, taking on golden red highlights at times, becoming a flaming forest fire in direct sunlight. She’d gone through law school and her one-year clerkship with a shoulder-length layered shag. She cut her hair after her visit last spring to Harvard, a week after Professor Sam Truitt’s appointment but before his grueling confirmation hearings. She’d sat in the back of the lecture hall, listening and watching… and learning. Not about natural law versus positive law-she’d already read Truitt’s articles-but about the man.
The hall had been packed. No Socratic inquiry this day. It was a straight lecture, or rather a performance. The tall, handsome, broad-shouldered professor, a youthful, sandy-haired forty-six-as different from his faculty colleagues as she was from her fellow students bounded across the stage, taking the class on a trip, dramatically tracing the history of the law, the entire range of rights and responsibilities from the Code of Hammurabi to modern teenage curfews. Playing several roles, Sam Truitt became Madison and Hamilton tackling federalism, Zola shouting “J’accuse!,” John Marshall Harlan dissenting against segregation, and Clarence Darrow pleading for the lives of Leopold and Loeb: “Why did they kill little Bobby Franks? They killed him because they were made that way, and that calls not for hate but for kindness.”
Affecting a Boston accent, standing ramrod straight, he became Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the magnificent Yankee: “When the people want to do something and I can’t find anything in the Constitution expressly forbidding them, I say, whether I like it or not, Goddamn it let ‘em do it!”
He drew raucous laughter as Dickens’s Mr. Bumble, who, having been told that the law presumes a man to control his wife’s actions, responded, “If the law supposes that, the law is an ass, an idiot!”
Near the end, he became Willy Loman, telling his boss, “I put thirty-four years into this firm, Howard, and now I can’t pay my insurance. You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away.” Then he asked his students to consider the moral and legal issues of Willy’s suicide and whether the life insurance company should pay his widow. Before anyone could think it through, he was George in Of Mice and Men, shooting Lennie to spare him from a lifetime of imprisonment, asking what George should be charged with, and what are the moral differences between his actions and those of Dr. Kevorkian?
Cooking a stew of history and law, morality and philosophy, fact and fiction, Truitt mesmerized the students. Here was a professor who was witty and entertaining, profane and profound, charismatic and charming. It was a breathtaking performance, and afterward, the students stood and applauded for several minutes, whistling their approval, stomping their feet, crowding around him, peppering him with questions. Many of the women-Lisa included-desired him. She had to remind herself that this was a job, that Sam Truitt was her mark, and what she had to sell was herself instead of a seventy-five-dollar bottle of carbonated champagne in the Tiki VIP room.
But he was so damned smart and so damned sexy. What a powerful combination. In the tepid tea of academe, Truitt was a bracing shot of vodka on the rocks. Law professor as rock star.
She allowed herself a small fantasy. She was in the library of the Supreme Court, deep in the tall stacks, searching for some obscure precedent among the dusty volumes. She stood on tiptoes and stretched to pull down a volume, but it was too high. Standing behind her, Sam Truitt reached up and plucked the book from the shelf. Their bodies touched. She turned, and his arms slipped around her waist, pulling her close. She rubbed against him, an affectionate cat, and they kissed, a magical kiss that swept her away. Away from her past, from Max… from reality. She even tried out the name, Lisa Truitt, repeating it silently, then chasing the thought away. How juvenile! Sam Truitt was one of the elite. What would he see in her? Besides, dummy, he’s married.
The day after the lecture, Lisa hung around the student lounge, where several female students were sipping coffee when one gestured toward a tall, short-haired blonde with pouty lips who breezed in, sat down, crossed her long legs, and pulled a cellular phone from her briefcase.