Stephen Carter - Emperor of Ocean Park

Suddenly, an astonishingly well muscled woman of our nation thwacks against the boards below me, grabs the top of the wall with two gloved hands, and favors me with a sunny smile. She is clad in black spandex and red skates, and she moves with the easy grace of the natural athlete. “Hey, handsome, how come you’re not skating?” she calls, as though we have known each other for years. Her skin is gorgeously brown, her face plain yet roundly pleasant, her mouth full of huge teeth, her head unfortunately topped by a shock of hideously pressed flat curls. Two gold loops, one large, one small, hang from each pierced ear. She is close to six feet tall, and older than I first thought: perhaps in her mid-thirties. “Are you there?” she asks, still smiling, when at first I say nothing. “Hello?” She is, I realize in surprise, flirting with me, not an activity with which I have much recent experience. Her eyes sparkle with secret mischief, and her toothy grin is contagious.

I find myself smiling back, but my throat is dry, and it is an effort for me to say, “I’m afraid I’m not much of a skater.”

“So what?” she laughs, shuffling her feet in place, a fist on each strong hip. “I’ll teach you if you want.” She reaches a hand toward me, palm upward, fingers splayed, and tilts her head to one side as if to stretch her neck. “Come on, handsome, you need to have some fun, I can tell.”

Unexpectedly stirred by her aggressiveness, and, I confess, already having fun, I am about to reply with a remark every bit as flirtatious as hers, when she casts a practiced eye down at my hand, observes my wedding band, loses her smile, says, “Oops, oh, hey, sorry,” spreads her long arms, and skates off, backward. With a last saucy wave, she swirls away and is lost in the crowded rink. To my surprise, I am pierced with a sense of loss so strong that for an instant I forget to watch out for Bentley, who naturally chooses that moment to collide with another skater. He leaves the rink wailing, his lip split bloodily. Mariah, full of apologies, is in tears herself. A couple of her spoiled children laugh at Bentley’s clumsiness, the others sob at all the blood. I hug my son and apply an ice pack helpfully supplied by the management, but he is shaking his head and crying for his mother. I was nowhere near him when the accident happened and could have done nothing to prevent it, but Bentley seems to think I am guilty nevertheless.

Most likely, he is right, for the roller woman cavorts through my dreams for weeks to come.

At twenty minutes of four, I step out of a taxi in front of the building in which, just a week ago, my father had his office. I have traded in my blue jeans for the same charcoal suit I wore to the funeral, the only suit I happen to have brought with me to Washington, and one of only two I happen to own. I am early, so I window-shop. There is a jeweler in the lobby and a dealer in rare books on the corner, and I visit both, happy to be in a city so comfortable with its black middle class that I am not an object of suspicion in either establishment. In the jewelry store, I fight the temptation to buy Kimmer a small but budget-busting present-she has a weakness for diamonds, and I see a pair of earrings I know she would love. On the corner, I talk with the proprietor of the bookshop about a scarce pamphlet for which I have been searching, Bobby Fischer’s self-published account of his mistaken arrest for bank robbery, melodramatically entitled I Was Tortured in the Pasadena Jailhouse! I leave the owner my card; he promises to see what he can do. When I return to the lobby, Kimmer is already there, pointing at her watch and glaring at me. It is still three minutes of four, but one does not take the slightest chance of keeping Mallory Corcoran waiting. The great Mallory Corcoran does not wait.

Except that he does wait for Kimmer and me. Not only waits, but receives us with all the considerable charm he can muster. He comes out to the reception area himself, wearing no jacket, but, with crisp blue shirt and yellow club tie and yellow braces stretched over his substantial belly, kisses Kimmer’s cheek, shakes my hand formally, and leads us back to the enormous corner office, which, like most offices in the city, has views mainly of buildings across the street, but with a peek at the Washington Monument if you look at just the right angle. His desk is piled high with briefs and memoranda. It is one of the few desks in any law firm in the city with no computer in evidence. He leads us to a leather sofa, faced by two original Eames chairs, one of which he selects for himself. I marvel that it can hold him, but Mallory Corcoran, like many successful litigators, seems to have the trick of adjusting his weight to fit the situation. One of his three secretaries takes drink orders: tea for Uncle Mal and Kimmer, ginger ale for me. A tray of finger sandwiches materializes. We chat about the funeral and the weather and the press and the latest scandal on Capitol Hill. He tells us that a team of paralegals has packed all my father’s personal things and the firm will ship them wherever we specify; he asks if I want to take a last look at Oliver’s office, and I decline, not least because my wife is about to jump out of her skin.

Then we get down to business.

Uncle Mal begins by inviting a senior associate, a nervous woman he introduces as Cassie Meadows, to sit in and take notes. Kimmer is uneasy talking in the presence of a stranger, but Uncle Mal tells us to treat Meadows (as he calls her) like furniture. Not a very nice thing to say, and Meadows, a rail-thin denizen of the paler nation, blushes furiously, but I see his point: with so many people indicted for so many things in Washington these days, and so many indictments resting on vague contradictions in hazily remembered conversations, the great Mallory Corcoran wants a friendly witness in the room.

“Meadows is a hell of a litigator,” he tells us, as though we are about to go into court, “and she knows everybody worth knowing on the Hill.”

“I used to work for Senator Hatch,” she explains.

“And she was a Supreme Court law clerk and the top of her class at Columbia,” he enthuses, playing the usual Washington game of using resume power to bat away questions of trust. If she is this smart, he is saying, you have no business asking why she is sitting in. Then he adds the real point: “And, Kimberly, she’ll be working with me very closely on this matter. Everything I know, she’ll know.” Meaning that Mallory Corcoran, beyond this one meeting with us, will likely be too busy to help my wife out, so that she will be foisted off henceforth on an associate.

Kimmer stops resisting.

Uncle Mal is not the kind of man who is easily pinned down; nevertheless, the meeting goes well. He understands why we are here and he does almost all the talking. He asks Kimmer how her other meetings went, but barely listens to her answers. Kimmer has not had time to tell me much, but I gather she has not, so far, heard the answers she wants. The Senator, who gave her only fifteen minutes (with two aides in the room to prompt him), is firmly in Marc Hadley’s camp and kept telling her there will be other chances down the road; Ruthie Silverman was smooth and evasive; the civil rights lobbyist promised to try, but warned that the administration was unlikely to listen. Mallory Corcoran waves all of this away. What matters is who knows whom. He has his ear firmly to the ground, he says, for he loves cliches, rolling them grandly off his tongue so that his listeners will know he knows they know it is all an act. I wonder whether he will tell us about the skeleton that a cackling Jack Ziegler promised. Instead, Uncle Mal says that Marc Hadley is calling in all his markers, putting on a full-court press, pulling out all the stops-the metaphors go bumping into each other in fine Washington sound-bite fashion-and lots of my colleagues at the law school are helping him. “Probably to get rid of him,” Kimmer mutters, which I think might actually be true, but it is plain that she is upset.