Scott Turow - Presumed innocent

"So we ended," I told Robinson, "and we ended badly. One week she saw me less. The next week not at all. No lunches, no calls, no visits to my office. No 'drinks,' as we so quaintly put it. She was gone."

I knew she valued independence. And at first I tried to stanch my panic by telling myself it was only that: a show of freedom. Best not to resist. But each day the silence worked on me-and my pathetic longing. I knew she was only one floor down. I wanted nothing so much as simply to be in the same room. I went three days running to Morton's Third Floor, where I knew she liked to go for lunch. On the third day, she appeared-with Raymond. I thought nothing of that. I was blind then. I did not imagine rivals. I sat for half an hour, by myself, shifting lettuce leaves across my salad bowl and gazing at a table two hundred feet away. Her coloring! Her hair! When the feel of her skin came over me, I sat alone in a public dining room and groaned.

By the third week, I had passed the edge. I did not have to gather strength; I merely let myself go to impulse. I walked directly to her office, eleven o'clock one morning. I did not bring a file, a memo, any item for excuse.

She was not in.

I stood there on her threshold with my eyes closed, burning in humiliation and sadness, feeling I would die from being thwarted.

While I stood there, in that pose, she returned.

Rusty, she said brightly. A chipper greeting. She pushed past me. I watched her bend to pull a file from her drawer. A parched arrow of sensation ran through me, at the way her tweed skirt pulled across her bottom, the smoothness of her calves flexing in her hose. She was busy. She stood over her desk, reading the notations on the jacket, tapping a pencil on a pad.

I'd like to see you again, I said.

She looked up. Her face was solemn. She stepped around her desk and reached past me with one hand to close the door.

She spoke immediately.

I don't think that's a very good idea. Not now. It's not right for me now, Rusty. Then she opened up the door.

She went back behind her desk. She worked. She turned to flip on the radio. She did not glance toward the place where I remained another moment.

I do not think I believed at any time that Carolyn Polhemus loved me. I thought only that I pleased her. My passion, my obsession flattered and enlarged her. And so I did not suffer rejection; I was not ravaged by grief. When it finally occurred to me that I might have a successor, I did not have fantasies of his destruction. I would have agreed to share. I was devastated by denial, by longing. I wanted, simply, what it was I'd had. I craved Carolyn and my release in her in a way that did not end.

For me it never ended. There was nothing to make it end. Her willingness had always been only secondary, convenient. I wanted my passion, in its great exultant moments, the burning achievement of my worship, of my thrall. To be without it was to be in some way dead. I longed. I longed! I sat up nights in my rocking chair, imagining Carolyn, overcome by pity for myself.

In those weeks, my life seemed to have exploded. My sense of proportion left me; my judgment took on the grotesque exaggerations of a cruel cartoon. A fourteen-year-old girl was abducted, stored like merchandise in the defendant's trunk, sodomized in one manner or another every hour or two for three days, and then was beaten by him, blinded (so she could make no identification), and left for dead. I read reports about this case, attended meetings where the evidence was discussed. To myself I thought, I hurt for Carolyn.

At home I made my absurd confession to Barbara, weeping at the dinner table, crying in my highball. Do I have the guts to say it? I wanted her sympathy. That mad egoistic instant naturally went to make my suffering worse. Barbara would not endure the sight of me in any visible pain. Now there was no place left. At work, I did nothing. I watched the hallways for some glimpse of Carolyn passing by. At home, my wife was now my warden, daring me, with the threat of the imminent end of family life, to wear any sign of any neediness. I took to walks. December turned to January. The temperature sunk near zero and stayed that way for weeks. I trudged hours through our little town, with my scarf across my face, the fur trimming of my parka burning when it touched the exposed portion of my forehead and my cheeks. My own tundra. My Siberia. When would it end? I wanted simply to have-or if not to have, to find some peace.

Carolyn avoided me. She was as artful at that as at so many other things. She sent me memos, left Eugenia phone messages. She did not go to meetings I was scheduled to attend. I'm sure I drove her to it, that in the moments when we caught sight of each other, she could see my pathetic, hungering expression.

In March, I called her from home. It happened a few times. She had drafted an indictment in a recidivist case, complex charges with allegations going back to the 1960s. I told myself it would be easier to discuss involved legal problems without the interruptions of the office. I waited until Nat was asleep and Barbara was stowed in the closed womb of her study, from where I knew she could never hear me calling downstairs. Then I paged to Carolyn's listing in the little mimeographed directory Mac put out, containing all the deputies' home phones. I hardly needed to look to recall the number, but I suppose that in those moments of compulsion I took some strange satisfaction from seeing her name in print. It prolonged, in a way, the communication; it meant my fantasy was real. As soon as I heard Carolyn's voice, I knew how false my excuses had been. I could not bring myself to utter a sound. "Hello? Hello?" I melted when I heard her speak in a tone without reproach. Who was it she was awaiting now?

Each time I did it, I was sure that pride would bear my saying a word or two. I intricately plotted the conversations beforehand. Humorous cracks to dislodge her from indifference or chagrin. Sincere declarations for the instant when I was given half a chance. I could not make any of it take place. She answered, and I waited in a fiery pit of shame. Tears came to my eyes. My heart felt squeezed. "Hello? Hello?" I was relieved when she slammed down the phone, when I quickly tucked the office directory into the hallway bureau.

She knew, of course, that it was me. There was probably something forlorn and beseeching in my breathing. One Friday night, late in March, I sat in Gil's, finishing a drink I had started with Lipranzer before he headed home. I saw her staring at me in the long beveled mirror behind the bar. Her face was there above the whiskey bottles; her hair was newly done, shining and stiff beneath the spray. The anger in her look was cruel. Pretense was so much easier. I moved my glance from hers and told the bartender to give her an Old-Fashioned. She said no, but he did not hear her, and she waited until he brought the drink. She was standing. I was sitting. The burly Friday-evening tumult of Gil's went on around us. The juke was screaming and the laughter was wild. The atmosphere had the beefy smell of Fridays, the musk of sexuality unlimbering from the week's restraint. I finished my beer, and finally, thank God, found the strength to speak.

I'm like a kid, I told her. I was talking without looking her way. I'm so uncomfortable right now, just sitting here, I want to walk away. And most of the time, the only thing I think I want in life is to talk to you. I looked up to see how she was taking this and found her expression largely abstracted.

That's what I've been doing for months now, walking past you. That's not cool, is it?

It's safe, she said.

It's not cool, I repeated. But I'm inexperienced. I mean, I want to have this war-weary, so-what thing about it all, but I'm not making it, Carolyn. I got engaged when I was twenty-two years old. And right before the wedding I did my time in the Reserves, and I got drunk and screwed some woman in a station wagon behind a bar. That's it, I said, that's the history of my infidelities, my life of wild amours. I'm dying, I said. Right this minute. Sitting on this fucking bar stool, I am just about dead. You like that? I'm shaking. My heart is hammering. In a minute, I'll need air. That's not very cool, is it?