HARRIS WAS MOSTLY FINISHED WITH HIS BURGER. JOHN HAD managed only three or four bites of his own before starting in on his fries, eating them one by one, savoring the saltiness of the first four before setting the fifth one down half-eaten. John picked up his empty whiskey glass and, turning to catch the eye of the waitress, held it up to her to signal for another—his third. Harris was working through a heavily iced Pepsi. They were among the last of the lunch diners at some Irish pub off Broadway south of City Hall. Christmas music played faintly in the background.
“You going for a record?” Harris asked.
“What else am I doing today?” John picked up a fry and forced himself to eat it.
It was the first time that they had seen each other since the trial ended. John picked the restaurant—it was a place the two of them had occasionally met for lunch before everything went to hell, conveniently located between their two offices. They’d already gotten through the ritual pleasantries.
How’s Jane? Fine. Still pissed. How are the kids? They’re getting big. How are you holding up? A shrug. What are you doing? Trying to figure out what’s next.
Then it was John’s turn.
How’s business? Doing great. Winning your case put me on the map. You seeing anybody? There’s a couple of guys, but nobody serious. How are things with your mom? Still strained, but she’s getting used to the fact that I’m not going to marry a nice Jewish girl.
After the waitress dropped John’s third drink at the table (was he drunk or did she wink at him when she did so?), Harris pushed his empty plate away and wiped his mouth.
“I’m sorry I haven’t come to see you and Jane in a while.”
“It’s not like we’re hosting any dinners.”
“No. I guess not. Cigarette
John took one.
“You drinking a lot?” Harris asked after he lit his.
“Sometimes.”
“You need to get your shit together.”
John lit his cigarette and chased the smoke from his mouth with a sip from his drink. “The firm won’t take me back, Harris.”
Harris nodded and took a drag off his cigarette to think. “Take whatever they’re offering and move on with your life.”
“Whose side are you on?”
Harris shook his head. “Don’t be an asshole.”
“It would be easier,” John said, “to take their bullshit deal if I had something lined up for after. Right now, they’re waiting me out. I can’t do any legal work before resigning or I’ll violate the partnership agreement, and I’m not getting any distributions. They’ll just starve me until I take the deal.”
“So why wait?”
“I’m trying to give myself time to think of something, some way to salvage the situation or to get them to raise the offer, or how to move past doing this—I mean, I worked my whole life to get to this point, to do the things I was doing. I’m not even forty years old. I had twenty-five more years in this career. And now, what?”
“Twenty-five years is a long time to find something else and get back on top. You can take the money and hang out your own shingle. Be a generalist. I know it’s scary, but clients will come. You’re a good lawyer, John. People will forget about…about all this.”
John gulped the rest of his drink. He turned to look for the waitress with his empty glass raised, but Harris reached over the table and placed his hand over John’s and brought it down to the table. John turned back, ignoring the slight vertigo the alcohol caused, and looked down at Harris’s hand.
“Are you trying to take advantage of me, Harris? You know I’m not into men.”
“You’ve had enough, John. And fuck you.” Harris pulled his hand away.
“Relax. I’m kidding.”
“I’m not. You’re in a shit place right now, and yeah, life isn’t going to be great for a bit. But it won’t get any better if you keep drinking and keep avoiding the fact that you need to move on.”
“Would you hire me?”
“You don’t do criminal law.”
“You said yourself, I’m a good lawyer. I’ll get competent. Your practice is picking up—thanks to my case. Would you take me on?” John didn’t know if he was trying to prove a point or begging for a job.
“I’m not looking for any partners right now.”
“As an associate?”
“I can’t support another lawyer yet. Not full-time.”
John ran his hand over his face and shook his head. They sat in silence as Harris called for the check and paid it. Harris stood, pulling his jacket off the back of his chair.
“Come on, John. Walk me back to the office.”
John followed Harris out to the street. “I hope you don’t mind if I don’t walk back with you. It’s not like I have great memories of your office.”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“Thanks for lunch.” John reached out to shake Harris’s hand. Harris stepped forward and embraced John instead.
“I’ll let you know if I hear about anyone looking for somebody like you,” Harris said.
“Nobody’s looking for something like me.”
#
Harris held up one hand, nearly displacing the ash from the cigarette, and laughed. “I don’t think any nice Jewish girl is looking for someone like me!”
It was the punch line to a story about how a friend of his mother’s tried to set up her daughter with “a nice Jewish boy” like Harris. He had been home, along with his boyfriend at the time, to visit his mother. His mother had introduced Chad as “a friend from law school,” and Miriam hadn’t picked up on the various signals—or maybe she had and ignored them. Even as John laughed, he noted that Jane tracked the end of the cigarette and knew that she’d be up to clean any ash that strayed from it or the ashtray in front of them, despite the three drinks she’d consumed.
It was a good night—the two of them and Harris and Chad sitting around the small dining table in their new apartment down in the Village. It was their first dinner hosting since the wedding. John cooked steamed fish with ginger and scallions, broccoli and garlic, steamed eggs, and rice, of course. Served and eaten from their new wedding china—absurdly formal in context, given the paper napkins on the table, the cardboard boxes they’d yet to unpack scattered throughout the room, and their paint-spattered T-shirts and jeans. Jane poured the Heineken accompanying dinner into the crystal wineglasses they also acquired inthe wedding. After dinner, they had moved to scotch.
“Thank you both so much for helping us today,” Jane said.
Chad swirled the ice in his glass. “I’m just glad you marked the liquor box so we could find it.”
“Only the box with the shitty stuff,” John said. “I hid the good stuff from Harris. It’s wasted on him.”
“So a two bedroom,” Harris said. “Anything we should know?” “We just got hitched,” Jane said. “I’m three drinks in. Probably five before you go. So yes, I’m pregnant.”
Laughter echoed off the bare surfaces of the apartment—they hadn’t laid the carpets yet so they could paint. John’s gaze fixed on Jane, the light in her eyes as she laughed, the force of her presence reverberating through him, a resonance in his chest that felt dangerously close to a pulmonary embolism. When he tried to take a sip of his scotch, he slipped and some of it dripped down his chin and onto his shirt.
“God, John, you’re such a slob,” Harris said. “Jane, you could have done so much better.”
They all laughed, even John, even though he knew that Jane’s parents and some of her friends told her the same thing at one point or the other, and not in jest. Jane told him about these incidents, upset on his behalf, but John sometimes suspected that Jane worried that she was missing something obvious, that she should have listened to their voices instead of whatever it was that kept her with him.
“You guys are going to need to leave soon,” John said, “while I’m still able to try to help Jane fill that second bedroom.”
Jane rolled her eyes and punched him in the shoulder. “You’re a fucking comedian.”
Harris’s eyes widened. “She is drunk! I don’t know that I’ve ever heard such language coming from the mouth of a lady!”
“’Cause you’ve never had a lady, Harris,” Chad deadpanned.
Later, after more drinks and many hugs, John closed the door of their home behind Harris and Chad. When he turned back, Jane stood near the table, cluttered with glasses and empty packs of cigarettes and a full ashtray. She glowed in the amber light cast by a lamp in the far corner.
“Glad we had the windows open and that fan on,” she said, pushing the ashtray away to the center of the table. A plastic window fan set in the window near the lamp created a balmy cross breeze from the remnants of a warm, muggy day.
“Me, too.” He looked at the table. “We going to clean that?”
She pulled her T-shirt over her head. “Later.”
She walked to the bedroom, unbuttoning her jeans as she went. John followed. The bedroom was dark, lit only by ambient light from the street and the living room lamp. The bed was pushed into the middle of the room so the freshly painted walls could dry. She slid her jeans and underwear down and stepped out of them. He took her in his arms and kissed her. His hands glided over her thin layer of perspiration, cool in the draft from the window. He brought his mouth from hers, descending to her neck, around to her collarbone, down to one breast—lingering for a moment—down the side of her belly where he knew she was sensitive, until he found her hip bone with his lips. At this point, he was on his knees, hands atop the swell of her hips. He drew a line with the tip of his tongue along the crease of her hip until he felt the first brush of short hair against his cheek. He used one hand to lift her leg to drape his shoulder, conveniently opening space for his mouth to find the piece of Jane that he was looking for. He kissed it like a breeze, and Jane gasped and reached back for the bed to hold herself up as her legs grew weak. He guided her so she could rest her hips on the edge of the bed, and listened to her, each cue and direction, all of them conveyed through a twitch in her legs or roll of her hips or sudden exhale, until her desire arched her back like a drawn bow, until she came with a deep moan and curled forward around herself and his head. She held his face and kissed him, little dabs on his forehead, even as she fought to catch her breath between them.
“I don’t think…I’ve ever…that drunk before…” She said, then looked down and laughed. “How did you get your pants off while you were doing that?”
“I have many skills.”
She reached down and pulled his shirt off, and as he stood, she moved up on the bed. He followed again, catching her, and she reached down to guide him inside her. She wrapped herself around him. He was solid, but dizzy with alcohol. He searched for a thought to escalate the pleasure, elevate him to a ledge he could throw himself from. It was like rummaging through a drawer in the dark, hand passing over images, memories, abstractions, trying to locate the exact right one by feel. He heard the echo from earlier: “You could do better.” Something her friend, Betsy, had said to her one night after they got engaged. Jane asked what she meant, and Betsy said, “Someone whose parents didn’t work at a takeout restaurant. Like, you really going to eat chow mein the rest of your life?” Or the guy Jane dated before John, who had called Jane and said, “You need a real man, not whatever egg roll he’s got.” Or her father, who had walked Jane down the aisle, who said to John when he asked for his blessing (although he and Jane had already agreed to get engaged), “I don’t think you’re right for her, son. It would be better, for both of you, if you stayed with your own people.” But it was John over Jane in the dark now, and she was his to care for. His consciousness coalesced around their triumph and their power, and he was suddenly sober and she knew and pulled his head down to hers and kissed him. It was like a charge to a detonator. She clung to him until he lowered himself onto her. He could feel their skin sliding against each other as their breathing slowed.
“That was fun,” she said.
John grunted his agreement.
“Our home,” she said.
“Our home.”
“Should we try soon?”
“Try what?”
“For a kid.”
Blood rushed at the thought, and he moved inside her again. She laughed. “I don’t mean tonight.”
“Whenever you’re ready. But I thought you were going to try to make partner first? I don’t know that you’ll be able to do that carrying a baby around.”
Jane sighed. “You’re probably right. But God, this felt good, didn’t it? We should keep trying, even if we’re rigging the game for now.”
John chuckled, already leaden with sleep.
“No, no, you don’t,” Jane said, pushing against his chest. “Don’t pass out on top of me.”
John pushed with one hand and flopped onto his back. Jane sat up and walked to the bathroom. John heard her turning the lights out in the other room. When she returned, she stood in the doorway with a cigarette in one hand, ashtray in another.
“I love seeing you like that,” she said.
“Like what?”
“Taken care of.”
“I love seeing you like that,” he said, turning onto his elbow so he could look at her.
“Naked?”
“Exactly.”
She held the cigarette out to him, but he didn’t take it. She crushed it into the ashtray, set it down on a stack of boxes, and crawled into the bed next to him. He turned his head toward her. She was on her side facing him, eyes closed. One of her hands lay upon his chest. His final thought before the alcohol and fatigue caught up with him was, Please don’t let me lose this moment.
#
John lost the moment, and when he turned back to look for Harris to ask him if he remembered that night, if they had ever been that happy, Harris was gone, disappeared into the crowd on Broadway. He considered chasing after him, begging him to help him remember better, but stopped after half a block, moving out of the flow of foot traffic until he stood on a metal grate of a subway vent. Dank warm air wafted from below, carrying the odor particular to the New York subways—grime mixed with ozone. Why remind Harris of Chad, who had broken his heart three months after that night? Why remember that time better for himself? So that Jane would feel even more hollow whenever she got home? If that moment mattered, wouldn’t John have remembered it—or the hundreds like it from those years?
John imagined that those moments would keep them afloat in tough times, but instead they were nails driven through the two of them, crippling and mangling them and any chance they could have saved themselves by swimming separately. It wasn’t the first time John considered that Jane and the children would be better off without him. He wrestled with the thought when he was arrested, during the ride to be booked. I shouldn’t go home.
But he had. Because you’re a coward. Because where else would he have gone?
I shouldn’t go home now.
And what? Sleep on the street? Nobody’s doors were open to him. It was getting cold, too, this late in the year. Maybe he could use a token, ride the subway all night. Until you run out of tokens. He imagined himself, sore and disheveled, having to piss (Could he bring himself to piss off the platform? What about when he needed to shit?), somewhere maybe on the 6 train—John would avoid the lines that ran through the Upper West Side (What if the children saw him?)—and making eye contact with Geoff as he stepped onto the subway car (Geoff probably hadn’t been on the subway in a decade, but John saw Geoff, clad in a tweed suit, custom shoes, and arrogance). Even standing on the street contemplating it, John lived the moment—the shame and disgrace worse than the cops shoving his head down to place him in the cruiser. At least then, John believed acquittal (not an exoneration) was possible and would be enough, but now that imaginary plastic seat would be the end for him. He’d rather be under that train than on it.
A rumble shook the metal grate John stood upon, shaking him from his reverie—a train, maybe that train, passing just beneath.