Scott Turow - Presumed innocent

And when we're interviewing witnesses, I turn and Carolyn is staring at me, watching with this placid, almost rueful smile, as I do my stuff for in a meeting with Raymond, all the top felony people, I'll glance up, I'll feel the weight of her eyes on me, and she continues watching me in such an unwavering fashion that I do something, a wink, a smile, as a form of acknowledgment, and she responds, usually that little cat's grin, and if I'm speaking I stop, everything washes out of my mind, it is just Carolyn, things are unraveling right from the center of the skein.

"That was the worst part, this incredible domination of my feelings. I get in the shower, I drive down the street-it's Carolyn. Fantasies. Conversations with her. An uninterrupted movie. I see her full of relaxed amusement and appreciation-of me. Of me. I can't finish a phone call; I can't read a prosecution memo or a brief."

And all of it, this whole grand obsession, carried on in the face of a racing heart, a turning gut, a frantic sense of resistance and disbelief. I shudder at random moments. I tell myself that this has not happened. This is a juvenile episode, a mind trick with deja vu. I grope around inside myself for the old reality. I say to myself that I will get up in the morning feeling unaffected, feeling right again and sane.

But I do not, of course, and the moments when I am with her, the anticipation, the appreciation is exquisite. I feel short of breath and giddy. I laugh too easily, too much. I do what I can to stay near her, show her a paper over her shoulder while she's at her desk, so that I can linger with the details of her person: her hammered golden earrings, the odors of her bathwater and her breath, the soft bluish color of her nape when her hair falls away. And then, when I'm by myself, I feel desperate and ashamed. This raging, mad obsession! Where is my world? I am departing. I am gone already.

In the dark, the red-and-blue figure of Spider-Man can be made out on the wall above my son's bed. Life-size, he is poised in a wrestler's crouch, prepared to take on all invaders.

I did not grow up reading the comics-it was too lighthearted an activity for the home I was raised in. But when Nat was two or three we began, each Sunday, to explore the funny papers together. While Barbara slept, I made Nat breakfast. Then, with my son very close beside me, we sat on the sofa in the sunroom as we discussed and recollected the weekly progress in each strip. All the random little-boy fury of that age would leave him, and he was reduced to a more essential self, small and full of a transport I could feel through his body. So it was that I came to establish my rapport with the Web Slinger. Now Nat, in second grade and almost brittlely self-sufficient, reads the funnies by himself. I must await a moment when I will not be noticed to check on Peter Parker's fate. They really are funny, I explained to Barbara a few weeks ago when I was observed with the comics in my hands. Oh, for crying out loud, muttered my wife, the almost Ph.D.

Now I touch the fine hair, so thin against Nat's scalp. If I fuss long enough, Nat, accustomed by the years to my late arrivals, will probably rouse himself to murmur some gentle appreciation. I stop here first each evening. I have an almost physical craving for the reassurance. Right before Nat's birth we moved out here, to Nearing, a former ferry port to which the city dwellers fled long enough ago that it is called a town rather than a suburb. Although it was Barbara who initially favored this move, by now she would eagerly forsake Nearing, which she sometimes blames for her isolation. I'm the one who needs the distance from the city, the gap in time and space, to manufacture in myself a sense that some perimeter protects us against what I see each day. I suppose that is another reason I was happy to see Spider-Man assume his place here. I take comfort in Spidey's agile vigilance.

I find Barbara face down on our bed, largely unclothed. She is breathless, the tight muscles of her narrow back lustrous with sweat. The VCR hums in rewind. On the set, the news has just begun.

"Exercise?" I ask.

"Masturbation," Barbara answers. "Refuge of the lonely housewife." She does not bother a backward glance. Instead, I advance and kiss her quickly on the neck.

"I called from the bus station when I missed the 8:35. You weren't here. I left a message on the tape."

"I got it," she says. "I was picking up Nat. He had dinner with Mom. I tried to get in some extra time on the mainframe."

"Productive?"

"A waste." She rolls over and back, breasts girdled in her sports bra. As I undress, I receive a laconic report from Barbara on the day's occurrences. A neighbor's illness. The bill from the mechanic. The latest with her mother. Barbara delivers all this information lying face down on the coverlet in a tone of weariness. This her drear offensive, a bitterness too tired even to be regret, against which I defend in the simplest fashion, by seeming not to notice. I show interest in each remark, enthusiasm for every detail. And in the meantime, an inner density gathers, a known sensation, as if my veins have become clogged with lead. I am home. About five years ago, just when I thought we were getting ready to have another child, Barbara announced that she was going back to school, entering a Ph.D. program in mathematics. She had filed the application and taken the exams without a word to me. My surprise was taken as disapproval, and my protests to the contrary have always been disparaged. But I did not disapprove. I never thought Barbara was obligated to be homebound. My reaction was to something else. Not so much that I was not consulted, but that I really never could have guessed. In college, Barbara had been a math whiz, taking graduate division classes of two or three students with renowned professors, all of them hermit-like creatures with wild-grown beards. But she had been cavalier about her abilities. Now, I learned, mathematics was a calling. A consuming interest. About which I had not heard a word in more than half a decade.

At the moment Barbara is facing her dissertation. When she started, she told me that projects like hers-I could not possibly explain it-are sometimes set out in a space as small as a dozen pages. Whether those were words of hope or illusion, the dissertation has lingered like a chronic disease, one more source of her painful melancholy. Whenever I pass by the study, she is looking pitifully over her desk, out the window toward a single dwarf cherry tree that has failed to thrive in the clay landfill in our back yard.

Waiting for inspiration, she reads. Nothing so much of this world as newspapers and magazines. Instead, she carts in from the university library armloads of heavy texts on arcane subjects. Psycholinguistics. Serniotics. Braille and sign language for the deaf. She is a devotee of facts. She reclines at night on her brocade living-room sofa, eating Belgian chocolates, and finds out about the operation of the world she never visits. She reads, literally, about life on Mars, the biographies of men and women whom most people would find boring, and certainly obscure. Then there will be a spate of medical reading. Last month she spent with books that seemed to be about cryogenics, artificial insemination, and the history of tenses. What is occurring on these galaxian visits to other planets of human learning is unknown to me. No doubt she would share her newfound knowledge if I asked. But over time I have lost the ability even to pretend high interest, and Barbara regards my dullness to these matters as a failing. It is easier to maintain my own counsel, while Barbara roams the far-off realms.

Not long ago it occurred to me that my wife, with her abrupt social mannerisms, her general aversion to most human beings, her dark taciturn side, and her virtual armory of private and largely uncommunicated passions, could be described only as weird. She has virtually no serious friendships aside from her relationship with her mother, to whom, when I met her, Barbara barely spoke, and whom she still regards with cynicism and suspicion. Like my own mother, when she was alive, Barbara seems largely a willing captive within the walls of her own home, flawlessly keeping our house, tending our child, and toiling endlessly with her formulae and computer algorithms.