Not yet knowing the reason, however, I thought this development was a victory, a chance to get our old life back.
"Great news!" I said when I came home that night. Judith was kneeling in her bedroom closet. "It's over!"
Judith just smiled blankly, as one does when listening to the terminally ill describe a miracle treatment.
"What are you doing?" I asked.
"Cleaning out." She dove back into the closet and I watched pumps and flats and running shoes fly over her head. They fell on the bedspread, at the foot of the dresser, across the carpet. I didn't know much about women's shoes, but they looked perfectly good to me.
I'll finish this quickly- if only for my own sake.
Larry Kirmer took me to lunch and told me I'd become "ineffective in the office." He was not wrong, but he was not kind, either. He spoke with the full authority of the firm's executive committee. There would be no leave of absence, no half-time arrangement, no face-saving explanation. I was a partner, but in the end that made no difference. According to the agreement I'd signed long ago, I'd be paid the value of my partnership over a period of seven years. They stretched it out to keep you quiet. If I contended the arrangement, the firm could cease payment. I was to be gone in two weeks, Kirmer concluded, and why don't you take your unused vacation now?
Thus began the sudden stutter of our financial engine. We'd been happily driving a huge domestic V-8 that burned tankloads of American currency- hundreds of thousands a year, fuel efficiency very poor. But who had cared? Who had cared when we'd tossed our extra cash into a new kitchen that we didn't need? My first severance check was in hand, already trickling away, but beyond that exactly no new dollars and cents were being pumped into the engine, and over the next six months I took us down to five miles an hour. Doing nothing, barely breathing, cost thousands of dollars a week. I liquidated the Schwab money market account ($246,745). I stared at the monthly mortgage bill ($8,780), in shock now. The monthly apartment maintenance fee ($3,945) was outright theft. We fired Selma, our baby-sitter, who had remained loyal and true and who kissed Timothy over and over and wept on her way out the door. Private health care coverage was $2,165 a month. I stopped getting haircuts ($62) and shoeshines ($4), I turned off the lights (0.03 cent/ hour), I bought pasta ($5.90/lb.) instead of fish ($13.99/lb.), I reused the disposable razors (twenty for $9.95). Judith fired the piano teacher ($75 per lesson). I canceled the credit cards. The units of luxury got smaller, then disappeared. I ungaraged the car ($585/month). We owed some taxes ($43,876) from the previous year. I had them take away the rented piano ($259/month). I canceled the paper ($48/month) and the cell phone ($69/month). Our hubcaps were stolen and I didn't bother replacing them with the authentic manufacturer's caps ($316) or the cheap Pep Boys version ($48.99). We were going two miles an hour, the needle on empty.
" Are you going to find a job?" Judith finally asked one night.
"Of course."
"No, I really mean it, Bill."
"I will find a job, okay?"
Judith had lost a few pounds, five perhaps. There had been some long, unexplained lunches, and she'd lost a few pounds.
"I understand that you may subconsciously need to do this to yourself, because you feel so bad. But you don't have to do it to us."
My son had taken down his Derek Jeter posters and given them to me, saying I could sell them if I wanted. There's nothing subconscious about any of this, I thought.
"I've contacted twenty-something law firms in the city, Judith. I've been to six search firms, I've been through the alumni directory, I've lunched with everyone I know." But I was damaged goods. The word had gone out. It was in my face, my eyes, my posture. Even though I tried to hide it and wore nice ties and talked about needing "new challenges." When you're desperate they can tell, and they pity you and hire someone else. It's monkey-logic, it's human nature.
"You were Yale Law Review, you were top-drawer!" Judith cried. "What's going to happen?"
"I'm waiting for the bounce," I confessed.
She almost laughed. "The bounce?"
"I won't break," I promised. "I'll bounce."
"When?"
"I don't know." It was the truth.
Judith's voice was nakedly bitter, dismissive. "How far down do you go before you do this bounce thing?"
I didn't answer.
"It's pretty far, isn't it?" she said, her own voice bouncing off the white ceiling.
I thought I knew you, I muttered to myself.
"And what makes this so-called bounce happen, anyway?" she cried. "What do you hit that makes you come back up?"
I loved Timothy. This is what I wanted to say. He had a nice motion with a baseball, he was sloppy eating his cereal, he brushed his teeth haphazardly, he was learning script and made funny errors with his capital K's, he could listen to an entire Yankees game on the radio and tell me how every run scored, he never picked up his towels or his underwear or dirty socks, he donated his allowance to the World Trade Center charity, he got carsick in taxis, he loved Bart Simpson, he practiced holding his breath in the tub, he was a boy. He was a boy I loved, every last molecule, and there had been another boy who was loved just as much, and I had caused his death. The bounce would come when I had forgiven myself as best I could, had earned some fragment of peace, but not before then. That was what I knew, deep in my own lost boy-self, but I could not tell Judith that.
"Listen," I said, "we'll sell the apartment. I'll do whatever I can. You know that. I can work for the government. I'll sell real estate. I'll drive a cab, I'll teach high school. We can move to another city and I'll work as a lawyer there. You know I'll do anything to support this family."
Judith didn't reply. Instead she tilted her head, adjusted her angle of perspective. What she did next scared me. She blinked. She was thinking. Understanding something- if not about me, then about herself. "I don't know, Bill."
"What don't you know?"
"I don't know if I can do this."
I nodded supportively, I thought. "It's a tough time. But we'll make it through."
Judith crossed her arms. "I feel very uncomfortable about everything. We're becoming poor." She waited for me to react. I didn't. "Poor!" she screamed.
"I would say we've dropped down no farther than what's politely called the upper middle class, Judith. I don't think you or I have the first goddamn idea what real poverty is."