“Harold, I’d like you to meet someone. Paul Madriani. Paul used to be with the firm.”

A limp hand comes out to meet mine and I get the once-over by Stone. He’s keyed on that all-important phrase-“used to be.” There’s a quick, pained smile, and he returns his undivided attention to Skarpellos.

“Paul, I think we should talk again, when I have more time.”

“Excuse me?”

“Not now, later at my office.” Skarpellos has turned me into an unwitting stand-in, an understudy for the usual cadre of office eunuchs that the Greek has somehow managed to misplace-a little show for jurist.

Stone waits for me to be dismissed.

“Call my office for an appointment, next week. We’ll have more time to discuss the thing then, the thing with your client.”

Standing here with nowhere to go, I have but a single thought on my mind-“What an asshole.”

“I’ll have to check my calendar. It’s pretty full next week.”

“Well, make time.” It’s the imperial Greek command. He turns before I can say anything, putting distance between us, Stone in tow.

“I’ll see what I can do.” My words are delivered down into the nape of his neck as he walks away.

I move away, abandoning a full drink on the table behind me, the price of salvaging a little pride, of saying “I was leaving anyway.” For the first time I realize that perhaps my departure from Potter, Skarpellos was preordained, for even had I survived my affair with Talia, pride would surely never have allowed me to weather Ben’s death and the compulsory primping and preening of Tony Skarpellos, the price of all success in the firm after Ben’s passing. It is, after all, a considerable consolation.

CHAPTER 8

I’ve picked the Golden Delicious from the tree behind the house, a whole bag, and brought them with me, a kind of peace offering for my regular visitation at Nikki’s.

Sarah, my three-year-old, is standing on a chair at the countertop by the sink, turning the crank on the little apple peeler. She is an endless litany of “whys?”-“Why is the apple round?” “Why is it yellow?” “Why does it have seeds?”

I tell her the ultimate imponderable-“Because God made it that way.”

She says, “Why?”

I catch Nikki looking at me from the sink.

It’s in moments like this, though increasingly when I’m alone in the big house, that the pain is greatest. The realization settles in that Sarah, this oblivious, energized innocence will never have a childhood like my own, two loving parents together with her. My daughter is rapidly becoming the product of a broken home.

“I have to go to the store for a few minutes. I may not be here when you two get back.” There’s an edge to Nikki’s voice. Watching Sarah and me, she’s caught herself teetering on the precipice of happiness in my presence. But my wife is nothing if not resilient. Quickly she recovers her balance and is again the image, the very soul, of indifference.

“I was just going to take her to the park. I thought you might want to come along. We could have lunch out.”

“I don’t think so.” The apathy of her voice is overshadowed only by the aloof language of her body huddled over the sink, her back to me. “The two of you should have some time alone.”

“I think she’d enjoy it.”

“No. I have some things to do.” Nikki is now emphatic.

I don’t pursue it. She is painfully civil toward me. But increasingly I sense that any relationship that remains between us now revolves around Sarah, locks of auburn hair, pink pudgy cheeks, and dark brown eyes like olives. She is the link that binds us.

I have tried on numerous occasions to have Nikki take the house. I have offered to move into her apartment. But she will have none of it. This is a point of stubborn pride with Nikki: It was her decision to move out.

She’s priming the dishwasher with soap now. “Tell me,” she says. “How’s the practice going?”

“Haven’t missed any support payments, have I?”

“That’s not what I meant.” She turns to look at me, a pained smile on her face. “You always manage to twist what I say.”

I can’t tell whether she’s angry or embarrassed.

“Just a joke.”

“No, it was a dig.” She is hurt, silent as she looks at me. They’ve become like deadly clouds of cobalt between us, these monthly payments mutually agreed upon to keep the lawyers out of our lives, a form of alimony to keep the wolves away from her door. Without intending it, I have unleashed Nikki’s perpetual nemesis. It’s a demon I have never managed completely to comprehend. She will stand her ground in arguments on the most meager point or principle until more timid minds capitulate. But place her in circumstances where she is required to ask for money and she becomes an instant, stammering wreck. I suspect that if I ceased my support payments she would suffer silently until the county, in a miasma of welfare payments, hunted me down and hung the collar of contempt about my neck. It’s as if the creator of all things dependent had omitted some vital element in Nikki’s makeup that permits her to ask when there is a need.

For the moment she has reclaimed the soul of her autonomy. Nikki now works for a small electronics firm, programming computers. Logic, it seems, is her second love, after Sarah. She would have me believe this is a position she secured as a result of fortunate last-minute training before our separation. But I know now that it was more the product of design than fortune.

Her return to academia revealed a certain master plan, a plot to leave me long before she actually stepped out of the marriage and pulled the rip cord. I’m now afflicted by a sort of melancholia on these visits whenever I am reminded of how obtuse I’d been not to see the signs. Still, I am sure in me deep recesses of my soul that had I known, it would not have changed the ultimate result.

“I’m sorry about Ben Potter. I know you’ll miss him a great deal.” It’s delivered with meaning. But I’m reminded of Clarence Darrow, who admitted that while he never wished for the death of another man, there had been a few obituaries he had read with some pleasure. I think that Ben’s passing is such an event for Nikki.

“The two of you spent a lot of time together,” she says.

More time, she means, than I spent with her.

Nikki still does not know the reason for my abrupt departure from Potter, Skarpellos. Whether she doesn’t care, or simply hasn’t mustered the brass to ask, I’ve yet to discern. She is packing a considerable burden of pain these days, masked by a cool indifference that I know is only skin deep. With our separation I have finally come to concede, at least in my own mind, that I had relegated my family, Nikki and Sarah, to some secondary place in my life. Nikki could not win in this war with my career, and she has always taken that as her own special failing in life.

“The firm was a busy place. It’s the nature of law practice.”

“I know. But if it means anything, I just think that he appreciated the fact that you never let him down.” She locks on my eyes for a fleeting instant, reading the pupils like tea leaves. “All those long hours, briefs to write, prepping for trials into the early hours of the morning. Whenever he called, you were there. It was a little more than just work,” she says. “It mattered what he thought of you. It mattered to you. That was important.”

She’s right. I’d come to realize too late that a single psychic “attaboy” from Ben was worth any endless number of long hours locked in the mental drudgery of the fluorescent cave that was my office at P amp;S.

For at least forty of his sixty years Potter was a human dynamo, the closest thing to perpetual energy this side of the sun. He worked seven days a week. In addition to his law practice and academic pursuits, he served on a dozen government and private panels. He was the penultimate blue-ribbon commissioner. Work was his life. It was his addiction.