‘Let me get this straight. You’re trying to co-opt me into coming with you to the home of a victim of sexual harassment in order to convince her to give you the whereabouts of her lawyer. Is that right? And you think she’ll talk to me because I’m a woman?’ Eleanor Maserov was standing in the kitchen of their marital home with a glass of twelve-month-old Shiraz in her hand and an expression that was the perfect cross-fertilisation of astonishment and contempt.
‘Well, I hate to say it but this isn’t just a problem for me. It’s kind of your problem too,’ answered Maserov.
‘Now you’re going to tell me again how if you don’t keep your stupid job we can’t keep the house.’
‘Eleanor, where did all this anger come from?’ Maserov asked and then immediately regretted it and swallowed the air as though this might be what one does when trying to un-ring a bell, one that had become untethered in one’s head. The clock ticked in the otherwise silent kitchen they once shared and he looked more closely at his shoes than he had since she had asked him to move out. But it was just as he’d thought, they were no more interesting than they were when he lived with her and their children. And still the silence whizzed around his ears as he waited for her to say something, something that promised to be not good.
Maserov moved in towards her and tried to put his arms around her.
‘In what universe does that seem like the appropriate response to this situation?’ Eleanor asked him.
Maserov drew breath but he had a ready answer. ‘Well, we’re both tired. We know each other very well, we’re under pressure and, most importantly, we love each other,’ he said with a vulnerability that couldn’t have left him more open if he’d tied his hands behind his back and approached her with his chin pleading, ‘Please hit me.’ But before she had a chance to lean in for the kill, he threw her off balance with, ‘We have two children, two little boys whom we each love more than anyone and anything else in the world. And no one will ever love them ahead of everything else other than you . . . and me.’
In the twenty minutes it took for the inside of the wine bottle to reach bone-dry Eleanor came around to asking what it was he thought she could do to help him get the details of Carla Monterosso’s lawyer, A.A. Betga, that he couldn’t do himself.
In the backseat of Eleanor’s car sat the two Maserov children in their respective car seats, little Beanie and the even littler Jacob. There had been no one to look after them so they’d had to accompany their parents. While Maserov went to see his children every night to bath them, read them stories, and put them to bed, the longer Eleanor’s mandated separation, her ‘much-needed time apart’, lasted, the more he worried that the separation might become permanent simply through inertia, even if it was never deemed permanent as a matter of any articulated policy. It would be a kind of status quo post bellum, a bellum whose casus was a mystery to him. One morning he had woken up and there it was, a bellum, resting on his wife’s face.
This led him to worry that his children would grow up with little memory of his being around much at all. Nothing else worried him more than this, not even the unemployment, underemployment or economic humiliation he was tightrope-walking to avoid. These were, after all, increasingly the norm everywhere he looked, although seemingly better hidden by people who weren’t him. And anyway, at least theoretically, they were reversible. But your children not remembering your being around, not loving you, that’s irreversible.
Maserov drove. Eleanor was sitting next to him. It had been a few months since she’d been in the Saab they used to share. Now, since asking him to live by himself, she had a much newer car, which she shared with a finance company that agreed to let her drive it, fill it with fuel, clean it and insure it, on the condition that she would pay an exorbitant undiminishing rental while the car depreciated to worthless.
When they pulled up not far from Carla Monterosso’s worn weatherboard terrace house Maserov could see a look of unease settle gracefully on his estranged wife’s face.
‘You want me to go in?’ Eleanor asked uncertainly.
‘Not if you can get her talking at the front door.’
‘You think just ’cause I’m a woman she’s going to give me the whereabouts of her lawyer when for some reason she wouldn’t give them to you?’
‘She won’t even let me talk to her.’
‘She doesn’t trust you because you’re a male lawyer representing the company that’s protecting the man that sexually harassed her.’
‘That’s right,’ said Maserov. ‘She’s entitled not to trust me. I’m not blaming her.’
‘That’s big of you,’ offered Eleanor.
‘If I can talk to her lawyer I won’t need to bother her directly ever again.’
‘What are you going to say to her lawyer?’
‘We don’t have to get into that now.’
‘Will it be fair?’
‘That’s what she’s got a lawyer for.’
‘So it won’t be fair?’
‘If it’s within my power it will be fair.’
‘Do you have any power?’
‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘This is crazy!’ Eleanor said. ‘What do you want me to say to her?’
‘Okay,’ said Maserov. ‘You go up to the front door and ring the doorbell. She opens the door and sees you with Jacob in your arms —’
‘What! You want me to take Jacob to the front door?’
‘Sure, she’s not going to slam the door on a mother holding a little boy.’
‘But what if it’s not safe?’
‘Of course it’s safe. There’s no reason to think it’s not safe. She hasn’t any history of anything but alleging sexual harassment. She’s unlikely to accuse Jacob. Look, she’s an innocent victim, allegedly, remember? And anyway, her partner or boyfriend is a cop. She told me.’
‘A cop!’
‘Yeah, a chivalrous cop, apparently.’
‘What makes you say he’s chivalrous?’
‘Once when I came to the door she asked him to cover her.’
‘With a gun?’
‘I assumed it was a gun but it could have been a piece of halibut.’
‘She asked him to cover her! You’re willing to risk not only my life but Jacob’s life in the quest for —’
‘Eleanor, nobody’s risking anybody’s life. You can’t really think I’d send you into any kind of danger. You go to the door. When she sees you’re holding Jacob she won’t slam the door on you. Explain who you are and by all means you can slag me off to get her trust. Talk to her that way you do to Marta.’
‘What way?’
‘You know, that way, about men. Then tell her you can’t believe I’ve sent you here like this and then get her to tell you how to contact her lawyer, A.A. Betga. It will take less time than it’s taken to talk about it.’
Maserov watched as Eleanor got out of the car with Jacob in her arms. Turning back towards him she whispered, ‘This is the last time I do something like this for you.’
‘Why couldn’t I go with Mummy?’ asked Beanie.
‘That would have been overkill,’ said Maserov.
‘Overkill,’ said Beanie, momentarily assuaged by his father’s tone rather than by the words.
‘Do you want to tell me about your day at school today?’ he asked Beanie, keeping his eyes firmly on Eleanor’s progress.
‘Not today, Daddy.’
‘Okay, what day would you like to discuss? What about last Tuesday?’
‘I don’t remember that day.’
‘Sure you do, came after last Monday.’
Beanie was considering the question as he watched his father watching Eleanor in conversation with Carla on the doorstep in the distance. Carla was talking to her. She hadn’t slammed or even slightly closed the door on her. So far, so good. Maserov was heartened. With good fortune like this there was no question he had a bright future ahead of him, he told himself.
Carla was holding her daughter to her chest with one hand and seemed to be reaching out to stroke Jacob’s wispy hair with the other. The kid was a success. Eleanor too seemed to be doing well. He wondered what they were talking about. Maybe Eleanor would come to feel invested in the case, in his career? ‘How about that!’ Maserov couldn’t help saying out loud. Carla had invited Eleanor to come inside the house. Eleanor and Jacob were going in.
‘Daddy!’ said young Beanie from the back of the car.
It had been a good idea to get her involved. She’d already spent more time talking to Carla Monterosso than he could have hoped for.
‘Daddy!’
The only other woman he could possibly have asked was Jessica Annand but that would have entailed disclosing the true nature of what he was doing at Torrent Industries. He winced at the thought. Sooner or later she was going to find out and she was going to hate him for it. That was coming, sure enough.
‘Daddy!’
‘What is it Beanie?’
‘I need the toilet.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes.’
‘How about a drink? Have you got your water?’
‘I need the toilet, not a drink.’
‘Oh shit!’ Maserov swore.
‘Yes, that’s right,’ said his son.
‘Really? Really now?’
‘Yes.’
‘Standing up or sitting down?’ he asked the little boy.
‘Dad, it’s the sitting down kind. I need to go now.’
A thin veil of perspiration lay on Maserov’s forehead. He told his son to hold on and then walked him to the front door of Carla Monterosso’s house, where the little boy was instructed to knock loudly at the door and ask for his mother when it opened. Maserov moved just out of the line of sight of whoever would open the door and he heard a man open the door and speak to Beanie.
‘Hello young fella. How can I help you?’ The surprised man was a slightly rotund but tall uniformed policeman.
‘I need the toilet. My mother’s in here.’
‘Oh, you’d better come in then. Second door on the left.’
Beanie ran in before anybody had a chance to change their minds.
‘Which way is left, again?’ the little boy called as he ran inside in desperation.
‘The side with your watch on,’ Maserov called out to his young son who was unknowingly sacrificing his dignity for his father’s career.
‘I suppose you’d better come in too, Mr Maserov,’ the policeman said. He closed the door and led Maserov down the hallway to where Carla Monterosso, holding her daughter, and Eleanor Maserov, holding their son Jacob, were sitting at a wooden dining table of Scandinavian design, staring at him each with a glass of wine in front of them.
‘Okay, I understand you’ve got to keep your job to keep your house. And that was a brave thing you did with your boss,’ Carla said to him.
The policeman leaned in and offered his hand to Maserov, ‘Acting Sergeant Quinn.’ He looked at least twenty years older than Carla and the nature of the relationship wasn’t immediately clear.
‘Oh for God’s sake, Ron, just let him call you Ron.’
The policeman, now duly berated, nodded his agreement. ‘Ron, then.’
‘I can’t tell you where Betga is. I hate the son of a bitch but I’m not the kind of person . . .’ Carla said, resuming her conversation with Eleanor.
She paused, not quite sure what kind of person she was. ‘Look, I think the sleazy, dishonest bastard was at least once trying to help me so I don’t want to get him into any trouble.’
‘He’s not in any trouble, not as far as I’m aware, not from me,’ explained Maserov. ‘I only want to talk to him in his capacity as a lawyer, as your lawyer.’
‘So just talk to me,’ Carla offered pragmatically.
‘I can’t. If he’s still representing you, I’m obliged to talk to you through him, ethically obliged. Is he still your lawyer, at least for this matter?’
‘I don’t have any other matters.’
‘Okay, sure, but is he your lawyer in your case against Torrent Industries?’
‘Yes,’ Carla said. ‘Yes, I suppose he still is.’
‘Well, how can I negotiate with him if I can’t contact him?’ Maserov asked.
‘I don’t mean to be rude,’ Carla replied, ‘but that’s your problem. I’m planning on taking this to court.’
‘It is my problem but it’s also your problem. I can’t help you if I can’t get hold of him.’
‘I’m no lawyer, Mr Maserov, but isn’t it your job to help the people I’m suing?’
‘It doesn’t have to be like that; it doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game,’ answered Maserov.
Carla Monterosso poured herself and Eleanor Maserov each a second glass of wine and asked, ‘It does, doesn’t it?’
From down the hall came the sound of young Beanie Maserov flushing the toilet.
‘It doesn’t, actually,’ said Eleanor. ‘You know, you could do a lot worse than having my husband as the lawyer acting for Torrent Industries.’
Carla took her gaze from her glass and gave it to Eleanor. ‘You’re a teacher, right, not a lawyer?’ she asked.
‘That’s right,’ said Eleanor.
‘I can’t tell you where he is but sooner or later you’ll find him, or at least someone who might know where to find him . . . at one of two hotels: the Dick Whittington or the Grosvenor,’ Carla said, as though hoping some or other deity would forgive her for divulging this, even if Betga wouldn’t.
‘Pubs . . . in St Kilda?’
‘Yep, sorry, it’s the best I can do. Don’t tell him it was me. Case the place for regulars and choose one. It won’t be him but they’ll know how to find him.’