"Please explain," Dan Tuthill said.
"We feel that Mr. Wyeth presents genuine difficulties."
A long pause. I stared at my speakerphone.
"It's a matter of confidence," she said.
"Mr. Wyeth is an extraordinary lawyer," came the voice of Dan Tuthill. "You yourself have said as much in the past, I believe."
The room was silent.
"He's a hell of a vicious negotiator."
More nothingness.
"This is nuts. We're talking about a good guy."
"The circumstances are unusual, I would agree," said Amanda Jenks.
"Yes, and everybody is genuinely sensitive to that," answered Dan Tuthill.
"It's very problematic."
"Yes, but am I not correct that Mr. Doan is not intimately involved with the day-to-day legal matters of the bank?"
"Mr. Doan is extremely valuable to this bank," Amanda Jenks said evenly. "I think you know that. Let's speak plainly, Dan, okay? We can't conclude this agreement if Mr. Wyeth is involved."
"Involved?"
"On the account, yes."
"Your bank has a successful eighteen-year relationship with this firm, one that includes dozens of personnel on both sides, and you're willing to cancel that because of Bill's presence on the account?"
Amanda Jenks did not reply. Someone coughed, as if to emphasize the silence. "What are you guys billing us?" she finally said. "Twenty, twenty-one million a year?"
Thus did I hear the gunshot of my own execution.
Dan Tuthill then gave a very nice speech, but they wouldn't budge. Later I learned that Wilson Doan and a few of my firm's most senior partners had played a round of golf a week earlier at the Blind Brook Country Club north of the city and whatever needed to be said had been uttered by about the fourth hole so that they could enjoy the game. They hadn't bothered to tell Dan Tuthill, either.
I was taken off the bank account, which cut my hours at the firm by more than a third, but Wilson Doan was not done, not by any means. As predicted, he and his wife filed a $40 million personal injury negligence suit against me. How did they arrive at the sum of $40 million? Certainly we didn't have money anywhere close to that. The suit was handled by Adolphus Clay III, the famous trial lawyer, a balding, droopy-eyed fox who stood before the television cameras and explained that the Doans were not in any way vindictive but were concerned with getting the message "out there" about the dangers of peanut products. "This is their sole motivation," he said. "I assure you."
Clay, it may be remembered, was the man who won a $700 million class-action suit against the cigarette companies, so naturally he had an additional motivation to take this case- as a precursor to another class-action suit against the prepared-food manufacturers who used nut oil in their goods without explicit warnings on the packaging. The day he announced the suit, the stock price of the country's largest peanut oil manufacturer dropped by ten points and the major peanut allergy Web site had an additional 320,000 hits. I had stepped from the safety of my own small private life into the serrating edge of American mass culture. On our first consultation, my lawyer put Clay's chances of winning a large verdict at four out of five, and said that even an unsuccessful defense would cost me perhaps $1 million, with a $100,000 retainer, payable immediately, now, right here, in his hand.
When I reported these details to Judith she nodded and said she was going out to have her hair done.
I was not present when Judith first met Wilson Doan Sr., privately, at her suggestion, for only much later was I told, but I know her well enough to bet that her desire to sleep with him probably began at the funeral, which she attended alone- though dressed rather well, her black silk blouse not as loose as it could have been. Doan was massive in his sorrow, and this would have quietly appealed to her. She would have found an enormous, distinguished man heaving in grief unbearably sexy. And the strange violence in his face surely thrilled her. She met Doan somewhere discreetly and let him know, with a touch on the hand, or perhaps even a frank lowering of herself against his thick wool pants, that she wanted him. For Doan's part, Judith's quivered offering of herself would have been an unexpected pleasure that only improved his fury at me, not diluted it. Men are quite able to separate their lusts from their angers, or to mix them, as necessary.
I do not hate Judith for this. Not so much, anymore. She was doing what she thought was best for Timothy. I think she and Wilson spent parts of six or seven days in one of the smaller hotels on the Upper East Side. Long lunches, lost afternoons. I imagine Judith was quite vigorous in her exertions, quite multiple in her enthusiasms. He was probably a good lover, old Wilson Doan, probably gave my wife a hell of a good fucking, certainly of the weird large-eye/small-eye variety, and that would have rattled her on a whole other level. I have no doubt that Judith surrendered to him completely, abandoned herself to the moment, breasts bouncing, mouth agape, eyes rolling. And why not? Sex gets more explicit as you get older. It has to. The clock is running. I imagine she told him he could put it wherever he pleased. Wilson Doan would not have smiled or joked or been relaxed, for the sex was a way for him to strike at me, and being an intelligent man, he would feel the hatred in his own pleasure.
The danger of the interaction undoubtedly excited Judith beyond her usual capacity, and she would have seen this contrast as further proof of her problems with her husband. Somewhere in the talk afterward she let Doan understand that she was going to divorce me and move away. She is a planner, Judith. She paid for these encounters with our family credit card, not bothering in any way to conceal them from me. But this wasn't quite as cruel as it seems. The human dynamic here is quite complicated, in fact, and you have to hand it to Judith, for she is extremely intelligent when it comes to the human dynamic; by giving herself to Wilson Doan, she allowed him, as I said, a measure of retribution against me, indulged her own anger at me, and even found comfort from her own alienation. But that is not all. She probably wanted to make some sort of symbolic atonement and hoped, too, that sleeping with Doan might soften his wrath. Or perhaps she knew his wrath was coming anyway and wished to get on the other side of it before it fell. Or maybe sleeping with Wilson Doan was, paradoxically, an act of sisterly support of his wife, who, tomahawked by grief after the funeral, had retreated to a very nice room in the psych ward of New York Hospital- the logic being that she, Judith, understood the wife's incapacity and wished to take up some of her wifely duties during her infirmity. Or, quite the opposite, maybe Judith was striking directly at Doan's wife, warning her not to endanger Timothy, lest she risk losing her marriage as well. It may have been any of these things, or a bit of all of them. Yet I think it was something else, too, and in a perverse sort of way, I could have warned Wilson, man to man, that Judith was more than his equal.
By appealing to his lust as well as to his fury, Judith neatly separated Wilson from his rational awareness of what behaviors most supported his civil suit against Mr. and Mrs. William Wyeth and the hope of collecting damages and penalties from their various holdings. As soon as old Wilson slipped his stiff decision-maker into my wife, he lost his lawyer's interest in the claim, his wife's undiluted righteousness, and a jury's potential sympathies. For, of course, Judith had documented. And not just with the credit card and phone records and a couple of friendly, damn near incriminating notes to Wilson not marked PRIVATE sent to his office (duly opened, date-stamped, triplicated, and filed by his secretary, thus becoming the instant legal property of the bank), but also in the particulars: seven pairs of sexy new silk underwear, cut high on the leg, worn only once, or rather afterward, still possessing not only the occasional gray pubic hair of old Wilson Doan but leavings of the same stuff that had helped launch his doomed son: his semen, in dried form, and protected forever and ever in clear Ziploc bags. (So much in life comes down to what happens to the semen, where it ends up- inside, outside, high or low, lost or found.) If Wilson Doan continued his suit, then it might well come out- it definitely would come out- that one of the plaintiffs was banging one of the defendants, which would be very smudgy indeed, and not pleasing to Mrs. Doan or the officers of the bank. Adolphus Clay III, wiser than most and foxier than all, caught wind of his client's afternoon diversions and soon the Doans had quietly dropped their $40 million complaint.