In her office, Katja gave a cup of water to the plant on her desk. It wasn’t doing well, and lack of water, she suspected, wasn’t the problem. An excess of water, if anything. She had found the plant sitting forlornly by the trash chute in her apartment building and brought it in to work hoping to nurse it back to health. But maybe she had been too aggressive; maybe those early ministrations had induced some kind of root rot that was responsible for the wilting and discolored leaves, the gradual defoliation. She didn’t even know what kind of plant it was, which probably would have been a useful datum. She could hear Streeter’s voice: Your intuitions will tell you that water’s good for a plant, but if you want to know the truth, ask a lawyer. Despite herself, Katja laughed, and when the phone rang, she answered with a smile on her face.
“You sound happy,” said a familiar voice.
Katja lost her smile. “I don’t understand why you keep calling me, Jason. What have I not been clear about?”
“You haven’t been clear about how you’re going to manage to live without me.”
Katja sighed. “Not as happily as if I’d never met you, but I’ll cope.”
“You know you miss me,” he said. “Put your hand down your pants,” he said. Katja hung up.
I made a mistake, she thought. I paid for it. Why can’t it just be over?
Jason had been a first-year at Michigan during Katja’s third year. He was from California, tall and good-looking in a rangy sort of way, with the tan and the legs and the springy, graceful walk that suggested he’d spent
a lot of time playing beach volleyball. He was, in short, not at all her type, which ran rather more to the bookish.
But they hadn’t met socially, and her guard was down. They met through the student peer tutoring program, to which she had turned as a less distressing venture than the TRO project, and he on the strong and unanimous advice of his first-semester professors. Jason wasn’t stupid. He was, she thought, probably a little bit too smart for his own good, the kind of person who’d been able to get by in college with a short burst of effort at the end of the term, who’d scored well enough on his LSAT to make up for the few times the technique had failed him. Some people were smart enough to do that in law school. Possibly Katja, if she’d taken the risk, which she would never do. But not Jason. “You’re not going to be able to get away with that here,” she told him, and he gave her a lazy, insouciant smile.
“Then I guess you’d better help me,” he said.
She helped him. He had no trouble learning the law, when he put in the effort. And he did, for her, sometimes. His confidence outstripped his diligence, infuriatingly so; he seemed to believe that joining an outline group or buying a commercial nutshell guide and cramming for a night would be enough. But Katja still found that she was coming to enjoy their sessions, to anticipate them. Jason admired her intellect and ability and dedication, and this was nice for Katja, who was more used to being admired for her legs. And at the end of a bunch of wisecracks about the students, the professors, the school, the legal profession in general, he’d tell her so, in a sweet and plaintive way that made her think a lot of his disdain was just the preemptive rejection of a world he feared would give him trouble.
When he turned back from the door one day as though he’d forgotten something and kissed her, when they started going out, she was surprised at how natural it felt, how easy. Jason wasn’t challenging in the way some of her college boyfriends had been. He didn’t demand that she justify her position on affirmative action; he didn’t ask her to rethink things from a Rawlsian perspective or tell her that Kant had proved her wrong. And this, Katja found, was quite a relief. Jason was easy, relaxed, comfortable like an old sweatshirt. They’d go running together, rent movies, play with his dog down by the athletic fields. She didn’t think about the question of whether they’d stay together after she graduated—she’d be clerking for the federal appeals court in Cincinnati—and that
was a relief too, a change from the boys who seemed to have their lives perfectly planned, the space a wife would occupy already rigidly defined.
And then there was the sex. Jason had a very uncomplicated relationship with his body. It did what he wanted, because that was what it wanted. Sometimes she doubted that there was any distinction between the desires, between the body and the self; she’d see him stretched on her bed, long and languid under the sheets, and marvel at his seamless unity. Things were different for Katja, who commanded her body’s obedience but not its love, and was painfully aware of it as a thing apart from her self, sometimes recalcitrant, sometimes embarrassing, and frequently the object of attention she’d rather have been without.
But with Jason she could at least begin to glimpse the possibility of unity. “Dualism is always wrong,” a college boyfriend had told her once, and begun to discuss Wittgenstein. Jason had more effective arguments. Ten minutes and she’d be gripping the sheets with white knuckles, eyes screwed shut, issuing sounds she’d never suspected were inside her. Twenty and she’d be beyond thought, lost inside herself, moving without willing it or even noticing, until a sudden peak of awareness rose through the sea and she said, “Come with me,” as though inviting him out for a walk, and he did.
Or not. Sometimes he didn’t; sometimes he continued on his own path, leaving her to gasp and recover and build again until some stunning curvature of space, some glorious improbable non-Euclidean twist brought them around to each other again, reunited them spent and drenched and panting. Katja had never come just from sex, just from a man inside her; not once, let alone twice, and as she felt herself clench and release around him, she couldn’t believe this was the same disciplined body that rose each day at six a.m. and ran five miles, the same voice that recited facts and holdings with calm professionalism in class. Now she heard it saying different things, words like “more,” and “harder,” and “again.” She would sit in class, shifting in her seat, mentally replaying her workouts and wondering why she was sore. And then a different memory would come back and she would think, That’s why, and blush up to her ears. Her body looked different to her, infused with purpose, awake in all its parts.
All this was a revelation for Katja, a world of difference from the respectable, unimaginative Connecticut preppies she’d grown up with, the kids whose fathers took the train to New York in the mornings and gave
their affection to martinis when they returned. “Most men are a disappointment in bed,” a sophisticated friend had told her once, and she’d nodded, affecting weary agreement, while inside her head the word flashed like neon, buzzing with possibility: Most? And now for the first time she could say, “So that’s what all the fuss is about,” and mean it as a statement and not a question.
She had a happy life with Jason, a small and private and comfortable world. The larger world, the one outside, was different. It gave him trouble when exams came around, as she had suspected and he perhaps had feared. He’d built a reputation as a slacker, and the study groups wouldn’t have him. Katja gave him her old outlines, graded his practice exams. She blamed herself, in part, for his lack of preparation; there was a time, at the beginning of their relationship, when he’d started to take her admonitions seriously, when he’d shown a real willingness to work. But that was just the time that she had started to appreciate their lazy evenings together, their long mornings in bed, and she’d stopped pushing.
She’d been distracted too; her own studies had slipped. She came to class unprepared; some days she skipped entirely. It was a far cry from the days of first year, when she’d dragged herself to every session despite anxiety that had her vomiting in the bathroom before class all the first week. School didn’t matter for her anymore; she was a third-year with a clerkship in hand and a job in D.C. after that. It was Jason who should worry. Katja put aside the anxieties about her exams and tried to help. She brought her books over to his apartment to study, though often enough they’d end up in bed, working at problems they knew they could solve. She took his phone calls when they weren’t together. And she was helpful. She knew the law; she answered his questions easily, off the top of her head, barely looking up from her books. Right up to the day of his exam. “Promissory estoppel isn’t an argument about a contract,” she said. “It’s an argument you make in the absence of a contract.” Only later, checking the time, did she wonder about that phone call. He didn’t, she told herself; he wouldn’t.
But he would; he had. Stupidly, with the belief that he could get away with anything, he’d called her on a cell phone from the bathroom. The law school trusted its students; the proctors assumed a certain degree of honesty. But they weren’t fools; they weren’t blind. And when they stood on the other side of that thin door, they weren’t deaf.
Would he at least have tried to protect her by refusing to disclose her identity; would she have stepped forward? The questions were academic; her number was in his call log. Katja admitted the substance of the conversation but protested innocence. Jason supported her on that, which might have been to his credit if it had cost him anything. Or if he’d understood that there was no possibility of forgiveness, which to Katja was immediately clear. The disciplinary committee accepted her story; no formal sanction was imposed. “But you understand we have to inform the judge,” her recommenders told her.
Katja understood; she understood too when the judge withdrew the clerkship offer. Academic dishonesty was a serious matter, and even unknowing participation showed a lack of judgment. Human error, thought Katja, analyzing the wreckage. Distraction. Sympathy leads to affection, affection leads to distraction, distraction to errors of judgment. Sympathy is an error of judgment. It was almost a syllogism, the perfection of structure to which legal reasoning aspired.
She learned the lesson: eliminate distractions. The smiling boys in the hallway, the instant messages sent in class over the school’s wireless network. Ridding herself of these things was in some ways a relief. The men on the street. Since high school she had practiced the art of not seeing, not hearing, of moving smoothly through the grasping world. With Jason she had felt herself open, but it was a simple matter to close again. She cut her hair short, and lesbians hit on her. She counted this a modest success. The haircuts were cheaper, if more frequent; she went to a barbershop instead of the salon. The barber hit on her, and she grew it out again.
Jason tried in various ways to get her back. There were jokes at first. What’s the big deal? Then a tearful confession: I did it for you. Because I wanted you to be proud. And finally, a flash of anger: I’m the one who’s getting an F.
She answered these easily too, off the top of her head, no research required. Actually, it is a big deal. Why would I be proud of you for cheating? And last: You should be getting an F. In fact, it had been slightly different: You should be getting an F, you asshole, her voice strident and rising at the end. Jason was still bad for her self-control.
And he wouldn’t give up. Not for the remaining weeks of law school, and not, astonishingly, after she’d moved to D.C., the firm indifferent to
her blemished reputation. There had been a time when she felt sorry for him, when it had been difficult to hang up the phone. Now it was just an annoyance, but a potent one. She’d paid for her mistake. She’d paid for it and moved on, and for the past to keep reaching out to her was wrong. It wasn’t fair. As she returned the receiver to its cradle, her eyes flashed such fury that Ryan Grady, passing in the hall on his daily rounds, stopped dead in his tracks.
That’s PMS, thought Ryan, or I know nothing about women.