William Lashner - Fatal Flaw

Hailey was popular, pretty, a prom queen who walked the high school halls arm in arm with the star halfback. Awarded a church scholarship, she left home to attend a small college in Maryland, and for the first time she concentrated more on her studies than on her social life. To her great surprise she discovered that she was good at academics. Dean’s-list good. Good enough for the church scholarship to be extended to graduate school if she wanted to attend, and she did. She never forgot what had happened to her father and family, never forgot how an unfair contract and unsafe conditions had left her family on the brink. It was that experience, she told me, that had sent her into the law, and when she said it, there was none of the ironic tone that normally left you looking for the explanatory footnotes. A law school in New Jersey gave her enough aid so that with the scholarship and loans she could make a go of it. Three years later she landed an associate’s position with a small but profitable plaintiff’s firm in Philadelphia. Four years after that, when an affair with the managing partner created a scandal, she took a stack of files and went out on her own.

“It all sounds so damn inspiring,” I say. “Rags to riches.”

“Yes, I’m the American dream.”

“How did you meet Guy?”

“At a seminar on proving and defending the medical malpractice case.”

“I always knew CLE had to be good for something.”

“That’s what I get for trying to improve my mind.”

“You think you deserve better?”

“I think I’m getting exactly what I deserve. Another martini, please.”

“When do you have to get home?”

“After this drink.”

“Then make it a double.”

I SENSEin her the grand design of some awesome inevitability. I don’t know from where it emanates, maybe it comes from having your father crushed beneath a load of pine, but its symptom is a weary resignation.

“Why don’t you just end it?” I ask.

“But I like seeing you.”

“I mean with Guy.”

“Oh, I couldn’t do that.”

“Because you love him?”

“Why else?”

“I don’t know.”

“See. It’s so simple, isn’t it?”

She is committed to Guy, absolutely, she tells me so all the time, there is no other option. But still, when I call, she picks a place.

“I am so tired,” she says. “Do you ever get so tired?”

“No,” I say. “I’m too frightened all the time to be tired.”

“Frightened of what?”

“Of learning that the best is behind me.”

“Sometimes I have this urge to just start over,” she says. “Be something new.”

“Don’t talk about it, do it. Guy has, apparently. You can, too.”

“But I already have. This is it.”

“You thought you’d change your life with Guy?”

“No, Guy was something else.”

“And what am I?”

“You are an indulgence. Something not good for me, like a cigarette or a drink.”

“Hazardous to your health.”

“If only you knew.”

WHAT SHEsees in me, I can only guess. What I see in her, besides the obvious beauty, is a sadness, palpable but elusive, a sadness that reaches into my heart like a claw.

I’m not struggling to understand why her sadness touches me as it does, why I feel about her what I feel; it doesn’t take Jung to dredge up the suspects. My mother drinking gin late nights in the kitchen, drumming her fingers on the Formica, wondering how she ended up married to this man, living in this tattered house in this decaying suburb, shackled to this brat with his whine like a siren. Or my father, in his chair in front of the television with a can of Iron City in his hand, sitting in the chair in the dark after his wife left him alone with his son, on his face the dazed expression of a car-crash victim staggering out of his wrecked vehicle. Why is it that children of alcoholics find themselves mysteriously attracted to the alcoholic personality? Answer that and you might understand why I found myself, many years before, engaged to a sad, sweet girl named Janice, who fulfilled all my greatest fears by breaking the engagement and running off with a forty-seven-year-old urologist named Wren. Or why, a few years after that, I prostrated my heart and my career on the altar of Veronica Ashland, a sad drug-addled woman whose betrayal was as inevitable as the thunderstorm at the end of a brutally sweltering day. Or why I find myself obsessively attracted to the sadness in Hailey Prouix. Is it that I see in her sadness a chance to ease my soul, to do for her what I could never do for my parents as they tore their lives apart? Or is it just that she is with my dear friend Guy and so hot my blood is boiling at the wanting?

IT ISusually me who calls, who tells the receptionist it is Victor Carl to talk about the Sylvester matter. That is our code case, the Sylvester matter, in honor of her silver-screen hero. It is usually me who calls, so I am surprised when I return from a court appearance to see a message in my box pertaining to the Sylvester matter. When I phone, she speaks to me in a whisper.

“Are you free for lunch?”

“Yes,” I say. “Of course.”

“When can you shake loose?”

“Now. Where do you want to meet? What are you hungry for?”

“Oh, pick a place, Victor. Any place, any place at all.”

She is waiting for me at the sandwich joint. There are little tables crowded into a long, narrow room, and the tables are filled with men and women talking loudly and stuffing corned beef specials into their mouths, strands of coleslaw hanging from their teeth. She is leaning back in her chair, arms crossed.

“What looks good?” I say as I sit.

“Everything,” she says.

“The corned beef seems to be it.”

“Nothing for me, thank you.”

“Are you okay? What happened?”

“The most wonderful thing,” but her voice is anything but gladdened. “What are we going to do, Victor, you and I?”

“Have lunch?”

“Is that all? Because lately that seems like all.”

“I’ve been following your lead.”

“Well, I’m a lousy dancer.”

“Did something happen between you and Guy?”

“Yes. Something happened.”

Just then the waitress comes to our table, her pad out. “Are you ready?”

“Victor, are you ready?” asks Hailey.

“I don’t know.”

“Can you give us a minute,” says Hailey. The waitress rolls her eyes before rushing off to grab an order in the kitchen.

“I’m not hungry,” she says. “Are you hungry?”

“Not anymore.”

“Then let’s go for a walk.”

“Where to?”

“Anywhere you want.”

Outside, it is damp and chill and the temperature brings a rouge to her cheeks. She wears a gray overcoat atop her lawyer’s garb, her hands tucked into the pockets.

“Do you want a drink? You look like you could use a drink. I have some beers in my apartment.”

“Yes,” she says. “Let’s do that.”

“Is it about work?” I ask. “Is it about Guy?”

“Yes.”

“Which?”

“Aren’t you sick of talking? Aren’t you sick to death of talking? The more I talk, the less I know. The words are so fuzzy they turn everything into a lie, and then the lie becomes the new truth and I don’t know anything for certain anymore.”

I begin to say something, some comforting inanity, but the hungry look of tragedy in her eyes stops me midword, and so we walk in quiet through the noontime crowds toward my apartment.

It is a mess, like it is always a mess. I leave her standing in the living room as I gather up the clothes on the coach, the towel on the door, gather them up and dump them all into the hamper in my bathroom. She stands motionless as I work, still in her coat, hands still in her pockets. When it is almost presentable, I stop and look at her standing still in her coat, and the sadness that is always there is pouring out of her. I can see it, a dark blue pouring out of her. She looks at me, and her eyes beneath her glasses are moist, and the blue is pouring out of her, and I am helpless to stop myself from going to her and wrapping my arms about her and squeezing, as if I could squeeze out the sadness.