Colin Harrison: The Havana Room

When I reported these details to Judith she nodded and said she was going out to have her hair done.

I was not present when Judith first met Wilson Doan Sr., privately, at her suggestion, for only much later was I told, but I know her well enough to bet that her desire to sleep with him probably began at the funeral, which she attended alone- though dressed rather well, her black silk blouse not as loose as it could have been. Doan was massive in his sorrow, and this would have quietly appealed to her. She would have found an enormous, distinguished man heaving in grief unbearably sexy. And the strange violence in his face surely thrilled her. She met Doan somewhere discreetly and let him know, with a touch on the hand, or perhaps even a frank lowering of herself against his thick wool pants, that she wanted him. For Doan's part, Judith's quivered offering of herself would have been an unexpected pleasure that only improved his fury at me, not diluted it. Men are quite able to separate their lusts from their angers, or to mix them, as necessary.

I do not hate Judith for this. Not so much, anymore. She was doing what she thought was best for Timothy. I think she and Wilson spent parts of six or seven days in one of the smaller hotels on the Upper East Side. Long lunches, lost afternoons. I imagine Judith was quite vigorous in her exertions, quite multiple in her enthusiasms. He was probably a good lover, old Wilson Doan, probably gave my wife a hell of a good fucking, certainly of the weird large-eye/small-eye variety, and that would have rattled her on a whole other level. I have no doubt that Judith surrendered to him completely, abandoned herself to the moment, breasts bouncing, mouth agape, eyes rolling. And why not? Sex gets more explicit as you get older. It has to. The clock is running. I imagine she told him he could put it wherever he pleased. Wilson Doan would not have smiled or joked or been relaxed, for the sex was a way for him to strike at me, and being an intelligent man, he would feel the hatred in his own pleasure.

The danger of the interaction undoubtedly excited Judith beyond her usual capacity, and she would have seen this contrast as further proof of her problems with her husband. Somewhere in the talk afterward she let Doan understand that she was going to divorce me and move away. She is a planner, Judith. She paid for these encounters with our family credit card, not bothering in any way to conceal them from me. But this wasn't quite as cruel as it seems. The human dynamic here is quite complicated, in fact, and you have to hand it to Judith, for she is extremely intelligent when it comes to the human dynamic; by giving herself to Wilson Doan, she allowed him, as I said, a measure of retribution against me, indulged her own anger at me, and even found comfort from her own alienation. But that is not all. She probably wanted to make some sort of symbolic atonement and hoped, too, that sleeping with Doan might soften his wrath. Or perhaps she knew his wrath was coming anyway and wished to get on the other side of it before it fell. Or maybe sleeping with Wilson Doan was, paradoxically, an act of sisterly support of his wife, who, tomahawked by grief after the funeral, had retreated to a very nice room in the psych ward of New York Hospital- the logic being that she, Judith, understood the wife's incapacity and wished to take up some of her wifely duties during her infirmity. Or, quite the opposite, maybe Judith was striking directly at Doan's wife, warning her not to endanger Timothy, lest she risk losing her marriage as well. It may have been any of these things, or a bit of all of them. Yet I think it was something else, too, and in a perverse sort of way, I could have warned Wilson, man to man, that Judith was more than his equal.

By appealing to his lust as well as to his fury, Judith neatly separated Wilson from his rational awareness of what behaviors most supported his civil suit against Mr. and Mrs. William Wyeth and the hope of collecting damages and penalties from their various holdings. As soon as old Wilson slipped his stiff decision-maker into my wife, he lost his lawyer's interest in the claim, his wife's undiluted righteousness, and a jury's potential sympathies. For, of course, Judith had documented. And not just with the credit card and phone records and a couple of friendly, damn near incriminating notes to Wilson not marked PRIVATE sent to his office (duly opened, date-stamped, triplicated, and filed by his secretary, thus becoming the instant legal property of the bank), but also in the particulars: seven pairs of sexy new silk underwear, cut high on the leg, worn only once, or rather afterward, still possessing not only the occasional gray pubic hair of old Wilson Doan but leavings of the same stuff that had helped launch his doomed son: his semen, in dried form, and protected forever and ever in clear Ziploc bags. (So much in life comes down to what happens to the semen, where it ends up- inside, outside, high or low, lost or found.) If Wilson Doan continued his suit, then it might well come out- it definitely would come out- that one of the plaintiffs was banging one of the defendants, which would be very smudgy indeed, and not pleasing to Mrs. Doan or the officers of the bank. Adolphus Clay III, wiser than most and foxier than all, caught wind of his client's afternoon diversions and soon the Doans had quietly dropped their $40 million complaint.

Not yet knowing the reason, however, I thought this development was a victory, a chance to get our old life back.

"Great news!" I said when I came home that night. Judith was kneeling in her bedroom closet. "It's over!"

Judith just smiled blankly, as one does when listening to the terminally ill describe a miracle treatment.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"Cleaning out." She dove back into the closet and I watched pumps and flats and running shoes fly over her head. They fell on the bedspread, at the foot of the dresser, across the carpet. I didn't know much about women's shoes, but they looked perfectly good to me.

I'll finish this quickly- if only for my own sake.

Larry Kirmer took me to lunch and told me I'd become "ineffective in the office." He was not wrong, but he was not kind, either. He spoke with the full authority of the firm's executive committee. There would be no leave of absence, no half-time arrangement, no face-saving explanation. I was a partner, but in the end that made no difference. According to the agreement I'd signed long ago, I'd be paid the value of my partnership over a period of seven years. They stretched it out to keep you quiet. If I contended the arrangement, the firm could cease payment. I was to be gone in two weeks, Kirmer concluded, and why don't you take your unused vacation now?

Thus began the sudden stutter of our financial engine. We'd been happily driving a huge domestic V-8 that burned tankloads of American currency- hundreds of thousands a year, fuel efficiency very poor. But who had cared? Who had cared when we'd tossed our extra cash into a new kitchen that we didn't need? My first severance check was in hand, already trickling away, but beyond that exactly no new dollars and cents were being pumped into the engine, and over the next six months I took us down to five miles an hour. Doing nothing, barely breathing, cost thousands of dollars a week. I liquidated the Schwab money market account ($246,745). I stared at the monthly mortgage bill ($8,780), in shock now. The monthly apartment maintenance fee ($3,945) was outright theft. We fired Selma, our baby-sitter, who had remained loyal and true and who kissed Timothy over and over and wept on her way out the door. Private health care coverage was $2,165 a month. I stopped getting haircuts ($62) and shoeshines ($4), I turned off the lights (0.03 cent/ hour), I bought pasta ($5.90/lb.) instead of fish ($13.99/lb.), I reused the disposable razors (twenty for $9.95). Judith fired the piano teacher ($75 per lesson). I canceled the credit cards. The units of luxury got smaller, then disappeared. I ungaraged the car ($585/month). We owed some taxes ($43,876) from the previous year. I had them take away the rented piano ($259/month). I canceled the paper ($48/month) and the cell phone ($69/month). Our hubcaps were stolen and I didn't bother replacing them with the authentic manufacturer's caps ($316) or the cheap Pep Boys version ($48.99). We were going two miles an hour, the needle on empty.