Paul Levine: Mortal Sin

Nicky probably balked when she mentioned me. I need another lawyer like I need another asshole. Besides, your old boyfriend’s just an ex-jock with a briefcase.

He was right. I don’t look like a lawyer, and I don’t act like a lawyer. I have a bent nose, and I tip the scales at a solid 223. My hair is too long and my tie either too wide or too narrow, too loud or too plain, depending on the fashion of the times. I’ve hit more blocking sleds than law books, and I live by my own rules, which is why I’ll never be president of the Bar Association or Rotary’s Man of the Year. I eat lunch in shirtsleeves at a fish joint on the Miami River, not in a tony club in a skyscraper. I laugh at feeble lawyer jokes:

How can you tell if a lawyer is lying?

His lips are moving.

And I do the best I can to inflict the least harm as I bob and weave through life. Which made me wonder just what the hell I was doing with Gina yet again.

If Nicky had said no, Gina would have waited, then tried again. When the neighbor sued over the property line, Give Jake a chance. I picture Nicky Florio running a hand through his black hair, slicked straight back with polisher. He’d squint, as if in deep thought, his dark eyes hooded. He’d shrug his thick shoulders: Sure, why not, he can’t screw it up too bad. Putting me down, building himself up. Hire the wife’s old boyfriend, something to gloat about at the club, tell the boys how he tacks a bonus onto the bill, like tossing crumbs to a pigeon. To Nicky, I was a worker bee he could lease by the hour. He could buy anything, he was telling me, including Gina.

Well, who’s got her today, Nicky?

Was that it, I wondered, my infantile way of striking back? Hey, Lassiter, old buddy, what are you doing in bed with Maureen, Holly, Star, Gina? Don’t you have enough problems, what with the Florida Bar on your back? What would the ethics committee say about bedding down a client’s wife?

With all the single women available, what are you doing with a married one? South Beach is chock-full of unattached women, leggy models from New York, Paris, and Rome. Downtown is wall-to-wall professionals in their business-lady pumps, charcoal suits, and silk blouses. The gym has an aerobics instructor plus a divorcee or two who brighten up when you do your curls. So what’s with this destructive, nowhere relationship mired in the past?

“Jake, what are you thinking about?” Gina asked.

“Star Hampton,” I answered, truthfully. I rearranged myself on the bed to look straight into her eyes. “Do you remember the time you hit me?”

“Was it only once?”

“Yeah. You were leaving me for some cowboy. A rodeo star named Tex or Slim.”

“It was Jim. Just Jim.”

“No, Jim was the Indy driver.”

“That was James,” she corrected me. “Or was he the tennis pro?”

“You hit me because I didn’t beg you to stay.”

“I don’t remember,” she said.

But I did.

We’d been living together in my apartment on Miami Beach. She stepped out of the shower, her hair smelling like a freshly mowed field. She kissed me, soft and slow, then said she was leaving. I told her I’d miss the wet towels balled up on the bathroom floor. She let fly a roundhouse right, bouncing it off my forehead, cursing as she broke a lacquered nail.

Good kiss, no hit.

She dressed quickly and tossed her belongings into a couple of gym bags. Then she said it to me, a parting line I was to hear time and again. “Maybe I’ll see you later,” she said, heading out the door. “And maybe I won’t.”

“Slugged anybody lately?” I asked.

She laughed. It was the old laugh. Hearty instead of refined. “Gawd, I was so young then. Did you know I turned thirty last April? You think I need a boob job? Am I starting to sag?”

She sat up, stretched her long legs across the bed, and hefted her bare breasts, one at a time, her chin pressed into her chest. The streaked blond hair hung straight over her eyes. Outside, the wind was crackling the palm fronds. Only three o’clock, but it had gotten dark inside the bedroom. I peered out the porthole-sized window. Gray clouds obscured the sun as a summer squall approached from the west.

“Jake! You’re ignoring me.”

So was Nicky, I thought. Maybe that was why she was here. Or was it just for old times’ sake?

“Can we be friends again?” she had asked when she showed up at my office for a lunch appointment.

“Friends?”

“Friends who screw,” she explained.

Which, come to think of it, is what we had been from the beginning. After all these years, I was still dazzled by her beauty, the granite cheekbones, the wide-set deep blue eyes rimmed with black, the body sculpted by daily workouts with a personal trainer. Attention must be paid to such a woman, I thought.

She dropped her breasts, which, as she well knew, sagged not a whit. “Jake?”

“Tell me more about Tupton,” I said.

“Ugh! No more talk about business.”

“I thought that’s what this was about.”

“Come on, Jake. That was an excuse. I missed you.”

She rolled on top of me and grabbed a handful of my sunbleached hair. “You get better-looking every year. I don’t know why I talked Nicky into hiring you. You’re too tall and too tanned and too damn sexy.”

“That’s why you talked him into hiring me. And here I was hoping it was for my legal acumen.”

“It’s for your amorous acumen.” She let go of my hair and began nuzzling my neck.

“Look, Gina, you’re just bored. It’s an occupational hazard of the haut monde wife.”

Her teeth were leaving little marks on my earlobes. She whispered in my ear. “If you think I don’t know what that means, you’re tres tromp e. My second husband took me to Paris. Or was it my third?”

“C’mon, let’s do some work-unless you want me to charge you two hundred fifty dollars an hour for-”

“A bargain at twice the price.”

“Gina. I’m serious.”

“I know you are. You’re suffering from postcoital guilt.”

“Really?”

“I’ve had therapy,” she said proudly. “My next-to-last ex-husband was a big believer in self-growth.”

“C’mon now, tell me more about Tupton.”

She sighed and rolled off me, her hair trailing across my chest. Her back toward me, I admired the twin dimples at the base of her spine. Then she turned to face me, her full lips pouting. “We invited him to the pool party to soften him up. Nicky’s bright idea. Why fight the guy, waste thousands on legal fees-”

“What better use for your money?”

“…when maybe we could reason with him, show him the good life, serve him some grilled pompano-”

“And chilled champagne.”

“Jake, stop it! If you don’t want to fool around anymore, treat me like a client.”

“You want me to pad the bill?”

“No, I want you to screw me.”

“Gina!”

“Okay, okay. Fire away.”

“So you invited Tupton to a pool party.”

“Along with a bunch of stuffed shirts, Friends of the Philharmonic, the opera and ballet groups. I haven’t seen so many bobbed noses and tummy tucks since the Mount Sinai Founders Ball.”

“A society crowd.”

“Business, too. With Nicky, a party can’t just be a party. We had some of the big growers plus a Micanopy chief or two. Nicky always says if you want to do business in the Everglades, you’ve got to make friends with the Indians and the sugar barons. And, of course, we invited Tupton, the turd.”

Dropping all Gables Estates pretenses now. More like Star Hampton, who once shared a two-bedroom Miami Springs apartment with five stewardesses, none of whom could scrub a pot.

“I’ve seen his name in the paper,” I said. “What did they call him, an ‘environmental activist’?”