Benjamin Markovits - You Don't Have to Live Like This

I said, “Sharia, like the law.”

“Nobody ever said that to me before.”

But I liked her; we talked. She had dropped out of law school after getting pregnant. Now the kid was two and she wanted to go back to school but couldn’t afford it. I heard a lot of her life story — she spilled that out, too. I had time on my hands and didn’t much like my book. That’s another thing the prosecutor’s letter told me. Bring reading material, but I should have brought a pack of cards. I felt too distracted to read. Sharia had other things to do. “I can’t stand around all day shooting the breeze,” she said. It’s amazing how time continues to pass even if you don’t have the mental attention to occupy yourself. It passes anyway.

Then Tony showed up, in a suit and tie — black shirt, maroon tie. I hadn’t seen much of Tony since the arraignment. It’s not like we felt guilty or complicit or anything. It’s more like we’d had a kind of gay impulse, which we both experienced but were embarrassed by afterwards. I don’t mean that that’s what happened but that’s what it was like. But I was glad to see him. He looked well, skinny and strong. His suit looked tight on him, and I said, “You look good.”

“I’ve been hitting the weights.”

“I don’t think that’s what you need.”

“What do you think I need?”

“I don’t know. Nothing.”

There was a joke on the tip of my tongue, anger management, but it was a stupid joke and anyway I didn’t want to piss him off. I said, “This whole thing has taken up a surprising amount of head space. It must have been worse for you.”

“Cris is the one who’s really on edge. We’ve been fighting a lot. She doesn’t know who to get mad at, so she takes it out on me. But Nolan is high on her shit list, too. She’s mad at all of us, and it was just getting better, it was just getting like we could forget about it, when this comes along.”

We broke for lunch, and then we came back and waited some more. Tony and I talked desultorily, as they used to call it in the books. At first there were uncomfortable silences but we waited so long they got comfortable again. I could say things to him if I wanted to or not if I didn’t. He felt the same. At one point he said, “This is what everybody dreams of. My day in court. What kind of society do we live in, where this is something people want?”

“Nobody wants this.”

“I’ll tell you something, Marny, I do. I want to say my say.”

A little while later the sheriff or orderly or whatever the hell he’s called called him in, and I had to wait out the afternoon by myself, and another morning, I had to sit through another catered lunch, before I could say mine.

WHEN THEY CALLED ME IN, I can’t deny it, I felt excited; it was like stepping up to the plate in a softball game. They led me through a corridor into a room. My impressions at this point became a little confused. There seemed to be a lot of lights and people. You could feel their body heat and the wattage heat, and since the room itself wasn’t very big, the atmosphere tasted low on oxygen. I looked for windows but there weren’t any, just some kind of vinyl wall paneling, which went with the plastic/wooden tables and desks, and the beige carpeting.

Liz Westinghouse was the first face I recognized. She sat at the front of the room, a little raised up, in a leather office chair; she was leaning forward, resting her weight on a lectern. But I also saw Robert James on my way in, against a wall. Beatrice sat next to him; I kept turning my head. The truth is, there wasn’t much room, there weren’t that many people. Nolan was sandwiched by a couple of lawyers, one white, one black. They had their papers on a table. Nolan wore a gray suit. There was a cop by the witness box and a cop by the exit, and for the first time it hit me (I don’t know how to put this without sounding stupid) that we had taken up our official positions. Nolan was on trial, I was a witness, and when I sat down I noticed Gloria in one of the rows of chairs.

Then everything happened like it happens on TV. They gave me a Bible to hold, they swore me in. You say the words and wait for something to change. It’s like you believe in magic. In fact, there was a little magic. I felt nervous before, and afterwards somehow the nervousness deepened, which made me calmer on the surface. Then there was a kind of administrative pause. Some of the lawyers looked through their papers, they talked to each other, not in low voices; the judge said something to a woman sitting a few feet below her and typing at a computer. And I tried to get my head on straight. I looked at Gloria and she looked back at me, but without communication. Her look had the privacy of a stranger, and the distance between us was big enough (with the lights in my eyes), she might have figured I was staring into space. But if it was a staring contest, she won, because I turned away.

On my left hand, against another wall — it was an odd-shaped room, with six or seven sides — the jury sat in rows. Two black guys and one black woman, a total of eight women and six men — I counted. There must have been a couple of alternates. The youngest-looking juror looked like Steffi Graf, but not as pretty. She had worse skin. The oldest had cornrows. He sat up real straight and looked strong and frail at the same time. The overwhelming impression made by everything — I don’t mean just the jurors, but the public, the lawyers, the judge, the cops, everybody in the room, the furniture, the lighting system, the vinyl paneling — was a kind of intense boredom, a careful, painful, necessary boredom, which only the lawyers seemed used to. That’s why they talked in their ordinary voices and sometimes laughed at office jokes.

Then Larry Oh stood up — he had decided to take on the case himself, instead of farming it out to one of his staff. He shuffled his papers and put them down, and walked over to me, like you might walk over to someone you know in a bar. In fact, I did know him slightly. We had worked on my witness statement together, but I saw him first on TV at the Elwood Bar & Grill. After a while, when this kind of thing keeps happening, the lines get blurred, everything feels connected. What you read in the papers, what you see on TV, your life. Larry Oh wasn’t fat exactly but had one of those boyish faces that suggests a boy’s figure, which he didn’t have. But he moved pretty well and dressed to hide his weight.

He asked some questions, I answered them. It was like dancing with a guy who can dance, you just follow his lead, and Oh took me slowly through the day. Tony picking me up, dropping his kid at Robert’s house, coming back from lunch to find him missing. Driving the streets, running into Nolan at my house, getting everybody inside. Then he said, “I want you to explain what made you leave the room.”

“Nolan wouldn’t tell us where the kid was. We tried to call the police but he took the phone out of my hand, by force. And then when Tony wanted to leave Nolan blocked the door. It was a physically threatening situation. Tony said, don’t you have a gun, and Nolan said something like, that’s right, Marny, get your gun. I keep it in my bedroom, next to my bed, and went upstairs to get it.”

“And then what happened?”

“Nothing. I mean I went upstairs and sat on my bed and didn’t do anything. I think Tony called out, I couldn’t hear what, and when I came back down they were fighting. You know, punching each other and wrestling on the floor, with Nolan on top. But Nolan was already pretty beat up and Tony caught him in the face, where he had this bandage, and kind of pulled it away. After that he managed to get out from under. Nolan was still on the ground, on his knees, and when he tried to stand up Tony kicked him. That’s when he hit his head on the floor.”