She giggled. “Sorry, can’t. Have to meet Benjamin.” Talia insisted on using his full Christian name in their social circle. It was, at first, one of those things they cooed over in public. But as with so many older men with younger women, it had begun to go sour and now rubbed like a burr under his saddle whenever she called him by name.
“He called me this morning before I left the office. Some dark, brooding secret,” she said, her eyebrows arched in mock suspense.
There was an instant knot in my stomach, the kind that accompanies dark prophecies. “What did he want?” I ask.
“Who knows? You know Benjamin. If he’s of a mind, he can breathe intrigue into last week’s grocery list.”
“Maybe we should discuss a little business,” I said. “These are supposed to be business meetings.”
But instead of concern, I drew indifference from Talia.
“You do remember? Business?” I said. “What if he asks what we’ve been doing twice a week for the past four months? Wants to know why we haven’t finished putting the limited partnership together?”
In his own way, Ben had cast the die that led to this thing between Talia and me. He felt that she needed a little legal talent to lead her through the morass of fine print in a couple of real estate transactions. I knew little enough about real estate. But the duty fell to the junior associate, Ben’s trusted protege. Talia held a real estate broker’s license, but Ben made the deals, fed her the commercial clients that kept her in business, that allowed her to buy her own pearls and run the Mercedes through a corporation that Ben had set up in her name.
“Don’t be so uptight. Lighten up. Remember,” she said, “you are getting paid by the hour.” Then she laughed.
It fed some prurient fantasy in Talia, in the shell game that was Potter’s system of accounting for my time with her, that at least on the books I was pulling down $175 an hour. In one of my less satisfying performances when I peaked too early, when passion erupted a little too quickly, she sat frustrated at the edge of the bed, turned, looked at me: “You oughta be ashamed,” she said, “billing in minimum increments of every six minutes.”
But on that day, as I lay in the bed watching her dress, Ben’s furtive meeting with Talia had my full attention. I was not going to be put off.
“What are you gonna tell him if he asks?” I persisted.
The vision of this woman in that moment is fixed in my mind like a cast bronze. She stood there with this vacant stare. I knew it-she had nothing prepared. Great, I thought, if Ben hits her with a question she’s gonna wing it. After what seemed like an eternity, she looked at me, winked, and said: “I’ve got it. I’ll just tell ’im what you lawyers always say when you sell a piece of property. I’ll tell him I was busy ‘conveying a little fee tail.’ “ She bent at the waist, her back arched, flattening her hands on the stool, and gazed lustfully at me over her shoulder and hitched the tight globes of her buttocks in a pert wiggle for my benefit-and then did that schoolgirl giggle she does so well.
In her words and antics there was a distinct fragrance. I could not place it at the time, but in retrospect I can now identify it with clear precision. It was the aroma of my career going up in smoke.
It was one of Talia’s less endearing qualities, her unquenchable penchant to face life and all of its drama with unfaltering whimsy. She could never fathom that I am of that vast generation for whom the drug of choice is now Maalox.
“This is serious,” I say. “What are you going to tell Ben?”
She had straightened up, arching her back, the fingers of one hand feathering the fringe of lace at the crease of her thigh. My nether-part was at full attention, under the sheet.
“You know, you really are an ‘A’ type,” she said.
“Excuse me?”
“An ‘A’ type personality. A lot of undirected hostility, purposeless time urgency-the whole nine yards.” She’d been gathering jargon like kindling from her analyst again.
“You weren’t complaining five minutes ago.”
She turned, looked at me, and smiled. “Can I help it if I like a good, compulsive fuck?” She didn’t laugh, for there was some truth to this, but she did show a lot of flashing teeth-even pearls of whiteness against her country-club tan.
In the months that I had known her, she carried me to a level of erotic excitement that I, in the early throes of middle age, had never before experienced. Dealing with Talia was a sojourn, which I am now convinced I will never again experience-one of those periods of your life that in later years you replay in your mind like the movies of your childhood.
Without warning she was on her hands and knees at the end of the bed, crawling toward me, the scissoring, slender, bronze globes of her behind, the crack ruffled by lace, reflected through muted light in the mirror behind her.
She looked at me-large, round, dark eyes-and giggled. Then without warning her head sank beneath the sheets-toward my rising prominence, toward the art of persuasion that surpasses all reason.
CHAPTER 7
On my way to the University Club I pass Saint Ann’s, the place of Ben’s funeral. It’s a Greco-Roman edifice that in any other setting might inspire respect if not awe. Here it is merely an architectural redundancy, dwarfed by the copper-domed state capitol with its white cupola and golden sphere scarcely a block to the south. I set a brisk pace along the mall, which on this noon crawls with busy bureaucrats, scurrying secretaries, and loquacious lobbyists all moving like maggots on the remains of some half-devoured meal.
By evening, the “K” Street Mall will be given over to its other occupants, an assortment of vagrants, winos, and the scattered homeless. They will wander through the city center on an aimless sojourn between the squalid liquor stores of “J” Street and meals at the rescue mission a dozen blocks to the north. I burrow into the standing crowd stalled at the signalized intersection on Tenth Street. A panhandler works the captive audience at the light with the fluidity of a maestro, his quarry driven by an uneasy embarrassment to a state of feigned inattention. The light changes, the crowd moves, and the beggar drifts off under the shadowed awning to the littered doorway of the five-and-dime to await the next, inevitable cycle of traffic.
The University Club is housed in a majestic white Victorian. Built as a residence for a railroad magnate during the last century, the structure has served over the years as a private home for wayward girls, a restaurant, and more recently, a funeral parlor. It was rescued from the wrecker’s ball two years ago by the University Club and its board of directors, and now hosts the regular meetings of a raft of civic organizations including the Capitol City Bar Association. Attendance at the bar’s meetings is practically mandatory, an opportunity to rub shoulders with the judges and glean referrals from other attorneys.
It’s a packed house, standing room only in the walnut-paneled parlor that now serves as the bar. I wedge my way through the crowd, a half-dozen drink tickets in hand.
There’s a little elbowing and jockeying for position. I order and retreat from the bar, a drink in each hand, to settle into a cushioned club chair in the lounge.
“Missed ya at the funeral.” It’s a gravelly voice. I look up. Tony Skarpellos was Ben’s partner, and for all purposes now stands to inherit Potter’s influence, the balance of sway in the firm.
“Tony, how are you?”
“Didn’t see you there, the funeral,” he says.
“How could you miss me in that sea of humanity?” I say.
“Ah.” He nods.
“How you holding up?” I ask.
“Peachy,” he says. “Just peachy. My partner blows his brains out, reporters and cops crawlin’ all over the office for a week, and this morning I get a call from this asshole in New York. He’s with the news, one of the networks. They’re callin’ for the deep scoop, you know, the novel approach. The national angle. Sure-shot nominee to the Supreme Court kills himself. What an asshole.” Skarpellos repeats the charge, this time with added conviction. “First question out of the box: ‘How do you feel about it all?’ I tell him, “Well, hell, except for the hair and little bits of gray shit all over the ceiling in the office, it wasn’t bad at all.’ Sonofabitch,” he says.