But this snow was so dense that not only couldn’t we recognize any landmarks within the park, we couldn’t see into the distance to get our bearings. Peering into vague whiteness, Nina and I set off.
No problem. Up ahead was a fork. We knew to take a right. Straight. Another right.
Then nothing looked familiar. It should have-we’d walked this route so many times-but nothing was visible other than soft mounds of white.
“We should be coming to a left,” Nina said after a few minutes.
But we didn’t. Somehow we’d gotten turned around. For two New Yorkers, it was a strange experience. We were lost in our own backyard.
Nina pointed to an overpass. “Do you know which footbridge that is?”
“Not a clue.” I peeled my glove back and peered down at my watch. The face was clear only for a second before flakes obscured it. We’d been walking long enough that we should have been at a park exit if we’d gone in the right direction.
We both had patients waiting for us. We had to find a way out.
It was silly to panic. The city was all around us. There were people and taxis and traffic and noise and stores and lights and sidewalks just hundreds of yards in any direction, but we were circling inside a storm. Every tree, rock, pond and bridge had become part of an unfamiliar landscape. We just had to trust that since we’d done this so many times before, our instincts would lead us home.
But what if we really were lost? Could we be lost in Central Park?
Square breathing, I thought. The way Nina had taught me long ago. Breathe in, one, two, three, four. Breathe out, one, two, three, four. Nina must have heard my inhaling and exhaling. She glanced over. “We can’t be lost for long if we just keep going in the same direction. It’s kind of fun, isn’t it? Not knowing where you’re going for once?”
Before I could answer, she said, “No it isn’t, not for you.”
Seven
It wasn’t a blizzard, at least not yet, but it was bad enough that a lot of people were shutting down their offices early. Kira Rushkoff, a senior partner at Forrest, Lane and Graffe, had walked fifteen blocks in the snow without anything on her head before she found an empty taxi.
A half hour later she arrived home. Upstairs, she didn’t remember to take off her coat or her dripping boots. She didn’t turn on any lights or make herself a cup of the English breakfast tea she liked so much.
In her husband’s dark study, she sat down at his desk in front of the computer. Alan never shut it off. The screen saver twinkled with stars in the cosmos. Tentatively, as if she didn’t know whether she was reaching into a treasure chest or a snake’s nest, she put her hands on the keys.
She hit the H key but it could have been any key. The screen saver disappeared, replaced by the desktop. The brighter glow made the diamonds in her wedding band glint hypnotically, and she stared at the silver-white bright shine for a second, distracted.
Each time she had done this, she’d felt the same overwhelming exhaustion at first. A feeling so heavy her shoulders sagged under its weight. That this was morally wrong should have mattered to her. At least as a concept. Only four months earlier, she would have found her actions abhorrent. Was it possible that she had become this person, living this life, doing these things, in only sixteen weeks?
Her fingers typed out his password.
It was an accident that she knew it. She’d barely been paying attention that night. They’d been here, talking, and he’d wanted to show her an e-mail from one of his students, so he’d typed out the seven letters. She’d hardly been aware that she was watching his fingers move on the keyboard, but when the time came that she decided to go searching for the truth, the password was there in her mind, teasing her with its irony.
J-u-s-t-i-c-e.
All around her, leather-bound legal volumes with gilt lettering on their spines stood at attention on their shelves, mocking her actions. Alan had seen to that. He had chosen as his little hobby-the single most insulting pastime he could have, considering who she was and what she did and how she felt about it.
Yes, she defended porn kings and smut dealers because there was no greater test for the First Amendment. Each and every time she won a case, she got satisfaction that she was tightening the screws on the protective glass over the Constitution.
The last big civil case-between her client, a pornography king, and well-known feminist Stella Dobson-had garnered more media attention than she’d ever had before. Even though public opinion was with Dobson, the law was clearly on Kira’s side. She’d won.
But at what cost? she asked as she lay in bed at night, staring at the ceiling, not able to sleep, seeing the faces of the women she betrayed-feminists and trailblazers and reformers. Women like her own mother, who struggled so her daughter could go to law school. Women who’d made a difference, like Judy Wilson, Emma Michaels. Like Dobson herself. All women she knew and admired, versus these men who were in it for the dollar. Not for principles. She talked to, met with, worked with, defended and saved the hides of businessmen who brokered in some of the most disgusting images she’d ever seen. And it was justified because she was proving and protecting inalienable rights. Except…
She couldn’t think about that now. She had work to do before Alan came home. He couldn’t find her invading his privacy. Even though he’s done worse to you, the strident voice in her head whispered. The voice talked to her all the time now and said there were no more excuses and there was no more time for weakness. There was too much to do.
The computer made a slight humming noise, like a bee circling overhead. The keys clicked in a rhythm that was slightly off kilter. It was easy enough to check where Alan had been the night before. Since he didn’t suspect she had access to his computer, he didn’t empty his cache, and the last twenty Web sites he had visited were right there for her perusal.
Three different women.
He’d spent the night with three women.
When she was lying in their bed by herself.
Kira had promised herself that all she was going to do was collect the Web addresses and the names of the women Alan had seen. She was not going to go look at them, but like a reformed smoker lighting up, Kira hit the key that pulled back the curtain and showed her the still photo of the last woman Alan had watched perform last night via her Web cam.
This was a new one. She was blond. Green eyes. Clear skin. Young. They were all young. She read the description of what this one did.
To date, Kira had watched every one of the women that Alan had visited. Studied their moves. Examined the way they looked at the camera and acted out their little sexual plays. She’d watched a brunette strip down, slowly, letting one piece of silk clothing after another drift to the floor, watched how the woman used her hands to touch herself. If anything, she’d been a little demure. Kira hated herself, but as long as Alan was addicted to having some kind of virtual fuck session with these women, she was addicted to looking at them, burning their images into her mind, hating them.
To the right of the computer, on Alan’s desk, was a framed photo of Kira posing for him on a beach twenty years earlier, when they had first started dating. She was wearing a two-piece suit and standing in the water, the waves lapping at her ankles, one hand on her hip, the other blowing him a kiss.
Dearest, it said in her handwriting, Dearest, I will love you always. That was the picture that Alan could see, that was the inscription he could read while he was jerking off to these strange women’s bodies.