Joseph Teller - The Tenth Case

MR. JAYWALKER: How did that come up?

MS. TANNENBAUM: It's going to sound silly.

MR. JAYWALKER: Try us.

MS. TANNENBAUM: At some point, I started cry ing, just like that. And Barry asked me what was the matter. And I told him nothing was the matter. When he asked me again, I felt I had to tell him the truth. So I told him I was crying because I'd never been so happy in my life.

MR. JAYWALKER: Did you go to bed with Barry that night? Did you have sex with him?

MS. TANNENBAUM: No, not that night. Not for a month, maybe two. I still thought he was gay. Any way, it wasn't about sex. I'd had enough sex by then to last me a lifetime. Two or three lifetimes.

MR. JAYWALKER: Was it about money?

MS. TANNENBAUM: (Laughs) I'd bought him Diet Cokes all night, out of my own paycheck, be cause I figured he couldn't afford to spring for a real drink. I didn't think he had a dollar to his name, to be honest.

MR. JAYWALKER: But he had a room at Caesars Palace, didn't he?

MS. TANNENBAUM: Back then, the big hotels would comp just about anybody, at least once. I don't know if they still do it. But in those days, all you had to do was ask. You have no idea how many flat broke guys there were back then, hanging on by their teeth, waiting for their luck to turn.

MR. JAYWALKER: So if it wasn't about sex and it wasn't about money, what was it about?

MS. TANNENBAUM: To tell you the truth, I had absolutely no idea. Love, I probably would have said at the time. Now that I'm older, and maybe just a tiny bit smarter, I guess maybe it was about finding my father. You know, the father I never had.

And right there, she lost it. No solitary tear welled up and trickled slowly down her cheek. No practiced feminine sob begged for the audience's attention. Without warning, Samara doubled over as though shot through the gut with a cannonball, her face contorted in pain, her hands knotted into fists, her shoulders shaking uncontrollably, her body heaving for breath. Strange, low animal noises rose from somewhere deep inside her. There was nothing in the least bit attractive about it, nothing charming, nothing to make some Hollywood director envious. But it was r eal.

For a full minute she stayed contorted like that, showing no sign that she was the least bit capable of reclaiming herself from whatever demons had so suddenly and so un expectedly seized possession of her. Jaywalker stood by helplessly, hugging the sides of the lectern with both hands to hold himself back from rushing to her. They hadn't re hearsed this. They hadn't talked about it. They had contin gency plans for just about anything that might happen while she was on the stand, right down to sneezing fits and bladder issues. But they had no plan in place for a total meltdown. There was no adjustment for something like this in Jaywalker's mental playbook. All he knew was that his client was in a place way beyond where the offering of a tissue or the extending of a glass of water made any sense, light-years past the point of asking her if she could use a few minutes to compose herself before continuing.

"I think," said Judge Sobel, "that we're going to take our lunch break a little early today."

And all Jaywalker could do was to say thank-you, walk to the defense table and take his seat, and do what everyone else in the courtroom was doing: watch and listen, and try to not w atch and listen, as Samara continued to writhe in the agonizing memory of her lost childhood. Only when the jurors had been led out, the judge had left the bench and the last of the spectators had filed out of the room in silence, could he then make his way to her and collect her from where she crouched, by then on one knee, on the bare floor of the witness stand. Only then could he take her in his arms and hold her and rock her, until finally he felt the first subtle signals that her body was beginning to unclench and soften, and he could at last allow himself to believe that she was on her way back from whatever long-ago and far away place her story had carried her off to.

Samara had pretty much regained control of herself by the time the afternoon session began, but from Jaywalker's per spective, her doing so proved a mixed blessing. While she was able to respond to his questions without outburst or interruption, there was something missing from her answers. Gone was her willingness to elaborate, to speculate into her own motives and to question her own actions in retrospect. Gone, too, was her vulnerability, which, even as it had been her undoing in the morning session, had also stamped her tes timony with the unmistakable imprimatur of genuineness. Jaywalker strongly suspected that she was not only aware that she was closing up, but that she'd even made a conscious choice to do so. It was as though she'd resolved to make a tradeoff, so determined was she to keep hold of her emotional equilibrium, even if doing so came at the expense of her cred ibility with the jury. And while Jaywalker could understand and even appreciate her decision, he didn't let it stop him from trying to draw her out whenever an opportunity pre sented itself, even as she dug her heels in and resisted.

MR. JAYWALKER: Did the relationship con tinue, after that first morn ing?

MS. TANNENBAUM: Yes, it did.

MR. JAYWALKER: Would you describe its progress for us, please.

MS. TANNENBAUM: The only way I can describe it is to say that Barry courted me. I know that's kind of a foolish, old-fashioned word, but that's what he did, he courted me.

MR. JAYWALKER: Tell us what you mean by that.

MS. TANNENBAUM: I mean that we dated. We went to movies. He bought me flowers. We held hands. We talked for hours on end. Again, nothing like that had ever happened to me before.

MR. JAYWALKER: Was there a sexual compo nent to the relationship?

MS. TANNENBAUM: Not at first, no. The truth was, I never found Barry terribly attractive. Not only was he a lot older than I was, but, well, he wasn't the best looking guy in the world. So there was an attrac tion, but it wasn't a sexual one. It was more like holding hands, kissing, saying nice things to each other. It was about tenderness, I guess.

MR. JAYWALKER: Did you like that?

MS. TANNENBAUM: Like it? I absolutely loved it. I'd never known there was such a thing.

She described how the relationship had progressed from those first days. Barry had been called back to New York on business, but he phoned her each day, sent her cards, had flowers delivered. Not gaudy displays, but small, tasteful bouquets. She remembered a half dozen yellow roses, for example, arriving on the sixth day after they'd met. Still, she never suspected he had money, not until a fellow cocktail waitress made a comment about her sugar daddy. When Samara looked puzzled by the reference, the other waitress dismissed her with a "Yeah, right." But the next day the waitress showed up with a recent issue of People magazine, featuring a story about the ten richest bachelors in America. Barry was number one. Samara had stared at his photograph for a full five minutes, trying to make the connection between the man she was falling in love with and the one staring out from the pages.

Whatever lingering doubts she had disappeared a few weeks later, when Barry, forced to cancel a return trip to Vegas for business reasons, asked Samara to come to New York instead. She explained that even were she willing to risk almost certainly losing her job by doing so, she didn't have enough money to buy a bus ticket. He told her that wouldn't be necessary, he'd send one of his planes for her.

One of his planes.

For Samara, being in New York City was like being Cinderella at the ball. Barry bought her clothes and jewelry, wined and dined her, took her to the theater, a concert, the ballet and the opera. She hadn't even known there was such a thing as the opera. They went to bed, finally, but even that was nothing like she'd ever experienced. They did it on silk sheets in his penthouse apartment, overlooking the twinkling lights of Manhattan. And instead of it being all about his satisfaction, it was all about hers. Instead of seeking to possess her, all he seemed to want was to please her. Unlike all of her prior Wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am experiences, with Barry it wasn't over just because he was done. It wasn't over until they lay in each other's arms, marveling over their good fortune at having met. In a word, it was love, something that Samara had never come close to tasting in all of her eighteen years. Not as an infant, not as an adolescent, not as a teenager, not as the adult she'd become long before she should have.