Robert Tanenbaum - No Lesser Plea

Sussman raised his palm. “Karp, cross my heart, this is all him. I have no idea what he’s up to.”

Louis was shuffling through his papers. “Hey, look at this, I got a drawing of the corporate jet. It’s got a what d’ya call it, a logo, on it. Hey, Karp, what do you think, sharp, right? Hey, Karp, where you going?”

“See you later, Louis,” said Karp, reaching for the door.

Louis got up and followed him. “Hey, Karp, let’s, you know, have lunch. We got to make plans.”

Karp turned and glared down at Louis. The man looked bad, that was a fact. His glasses were dirty, and there was a dried crust around his lips. His tan face was blotched and puffy and his hair looked greasy.

“Great, Louis. Let’s make it twenty-five years from next Thursday. I’ll call to confirm.”

Louis’s smile faded. “Twenty-five …? Oh, shit, hey, that’s all past, man. I mean, this is a new start. Right. I mean, I’m sorry. I really mean it. I mean if I caused any trouble at all, I am truly, truly sorry. What’s past is past, though, ahh, you can’t let the past hang you up, right? I mean, I said I was sorry and I meant it. Right? That’s past.”

Louis kept talking in this vein, in an insistent monotone. Karp couldn’t take his eyes away from Louis’s face. He felt a cold chill start in his midsection and crawl up his back. He shuddered.

Then something beyond Karp’s understanding happened. He looked into Louis’s wild, yellow eyes and he saw him. He saw the patently insane creature now babbling before him (hey, Karp, whadya say, Karp, hey what a deal, right? Karp? Hey, whata, whata, deal, right, hey, I’m sorry, alright?); he saw the phony madman under that, and under that the real monster, the beast of blood, and under that, under that, down beneath the rules and the laws, and vengeance and evil, he saw, and felt, a creature, a being like himself, writhing in a white-hot, ice-cold loveless hell, enduring torments so unspeakable that to release it by death, any death, would be an act of profound mercy.

Without conscious volition, Karp observed his hand reach out and pat Louis gently on the shoulder. Then he spun on his heel and left the room. He was sticky with sweat and breathing hard as he walked down the filthy corridors. He walked out of the Tombs into a bright, early summer day. He thought, ridiculously, this is the first day of the rest of your life.

A teenager in pimp clothes bumped into him. “Have a nice day,” said Karp. “Ah, fuck ya!” snarled the pimplet. Karp laughed merrily and headed north. For the rest of the day he sat in Washington Square Park and looked at people. Everything looked scrubbed and new, and impossibly detailed, glowing. He exercised his compassion, and mourned, joyfully, his lost innocence.

“And the thing of it was,” Karp explained to Marlene that night, “I didn’t change my ideas at all. I mean, I didn’t become a bleeding heart all of a sudden. I just was conscious, really conscious, for an instant, that me, and Louis, and Sussman, and shit, even Wharton, were just playing roles, and inside us there was something huge laughing at us all. Not cruelly, or mocking, but, like, ‘when are you people going to wake up?’ It was uncanny.”

“It sounds like it. You and the Grand Inquisitor.”

“Right. I’ve got to read that sometime. And the funniest part is, I don’t care about the trial. I mean, I want him to go to jail for a long time. And he probably will, even though he’s crazy as a loon. But I realized that what got me about him, what he was doing was a violation of the game. He wouldn’t play the game. He wouldn’t suffer with the rest of us. That’s what made him a monster. And I destroyed that. Or something did. Something did.” They were silent for a long while, thinking about how it had all played out.

She was sitting in his lap on a plastic couch in the patients’ lounge. After a while, Karp felt her stiffen and she made a little noise.

“What is it, Champ? Pain?”

“No. I’m scared, Butchie. They’re coming to show me the Face tomorrow.”

“Oh, God! Do you want me to be there?”

“No! I mean, I’ll need, I guess I’ll need some time for myself, you know?”

“Look, Marlene, I got to say this, umm, whatever it turns out …”

She put her hand over his mouth. “No, don’t say anything. Just squeeze me.”

The next day, it was a Friday, she called Karp late, around five.

“Hi.”

“Well?”

“I’m at your place. I let myself in.”

“My place? Don’t move, I’ll be right there.”

It was rush hour, and Karp had to put a body check on a distinguished elderly member of the bar to get a cab.

The door was open. Karp rushed through the apartment to the bedroom.

She was standing at the foot of the bed in a long-sleeved tan summer dress. She was completely transformed. Her ordeal had stripped the softness from her, and the planes of her face showed clear, through the taut skin. The right side of her face was discolored in patches and covered with a quilting of fine white scars. A black patch covered her right eye. Her hair was cropped short, and some peculiarity of the wounding had created a white blaze through her black hair from the forehead to the crown.

The cover girl was utterly lost. Instead, she had a face out of archaic imagination, like something painted on terra-cotta on an Aegean island or cut into bronze at Mykonos, for a hero’s grave.

As Karp stood there, his heart pierced and full at once, staring, her mouth, which was perfectly still, hardened into a grim line, and her one eye flashed defiance like a hawk’s eye, out of her hawk face. Her hands were clenched at her hips, in her old way, and Karp saw that her left hand was clad in a tight black kid glove.

Karp slowly raised both hands above his head. “Don’t shoot,” he said weakly. “I give up.”

Then he went toward her and picked her up, placed her on the bed, and pinned her beneath him. And he kissed her face, starting with the scarred part, and then her mouth, for a long time. He kissed every scar and the bad eye and the good eye.

Marlene started to cry. She cried so hard she couldn’t breathe on her back. She wriggled out from under him and went into the bathroom to sob great, whooping, wracking sobs for nearly ten minutes, while Karp stood outside and said her name, and she said, “Just a second, just a second.”

She came out, and said, “Whoosh! OK, that’s over. Christ, I think my patch shrank.” She walked over and examined herself in the long mirror on the bedroom door. Karp came and stood behind her. She saw his reflection looming over her own, and suddenly she giggled.

“What?” he asked.

“Belmar. I just thought of Belmar, for no reason.”

“What’s Belmar?”

“It’s a resort town on the Jersey shore. It’s part of the ethnic Riviera-we used to go there when I was a kid. They had this severed head, it was an attraction on the Boardwalk that would tell your fortune. Anyway, there were all these blue-collar bungalow resorts, little hotels, too. Italians around us, Russians to the north, Polish, Irish.

“I just had the image of you and me walking up the Boardwalk in Belmar.”

“Do they allow Jews?”

“Only with a responsible adult. Karp, let’s go sometime. Jesus, I haven’t been there since Christ was a corporal. We’d blow their pants off-Pirate Jenny and the Giant Jewboy. They’d be strolling the sand in their Jockeys.”

“It’s a deal. However, right now this minute …”

She turned toward him. “What do you think of glass eyes? Tacky, right?” She still had tears in her voice.

“No, I think a glass eye can be tasteful,” said Karp conversationally, close to tears himself. He said, “Champ, I want you so much, I’m nauseous.”