Sol Stein - Other people

"No."

I had expected her to hand it back to me. Or tear it up. She did neither.

"I'm going up," she said. "Good night."

Those words were in the coldest voice she had ever used with me. Might she be thinking why had I not destroyed the photograph when I found it wedged behind a drawer of her dressing table when I moved it into the attic? Might she be wondering how often I had looked at it? I had produced something unspeakable. And the worst was I wanted that picture back.

The line of Francine's neck was a stretched, soft "s" from below her earlobe to the delicate indentation just above her collarbone. Was it that, or the high cheekbones and the almond eyes? I was used to observing the details of appearance the way a detective looks for clues. I observed Francine, however, the way one reacts in a museum when you turn a comer into a room and suddenly see an exquisitely beautiful portrait of an unknown woman and begin to wonder what she was like to the man who, in life, touched her. Thomassy, I told myself, you are not a gallery goer; your natural habitat is the raucous courtroom full of thieves, adversaries, and spectators. She is not your scene. This is not your type of woman.

Like most men of my generation, I was accustomed to admiring the shape of a woman's calf when she crossed her legs. If a woman wore décolletage, I was aware of the part of her bosom that showed and of the part that didn't show. If a young lady was walking ahead of me, I'd notice the tuck at her waist or the way the halves of her buttocks alternated as she walked. Then all of a sudden kids were all over the streets saying This is my body, so what .

In my peek-a-boo generation, even the best of women were brought up as cockteasers. Now that they're older and hear the clock running, they're as determined to get under the sheets as any man. That's your type of woman, Thomassy. You go to dinner, a movie, then fuck. If she's married, you meet someplace safe and fuck. It's a simple program. What the hell are you doing watching that undeniably erotic line of Francine Widmer's neck as if she were an eighteenth-century painting? She's a braless kid. A client.

I had a mentor in law school who said, Don't put your penis in your pocketbook Leave clients alone.

"I don't think you've got a case," I told her.

She didn't expect me to say that. She thought she'd been convincing.

"We don't have the ingredients," I said. "When you're cooking, you lay out the steak, the potatoes, lettuce and tomatoes for a salad, right, and you know you've got a meal in the making."

"Don't condescend to a woman by using kitchen examples. In the kitchen, I improvise. So can you."

"What I meant was I don't see the ingredients of a case a D.A. can go into a courtroom and prove. He needs to say that a certain individual did so-and-so. This is the evidence. And he's got to know opposing counsel won't upset his prima facie case. He can't just wing it. Too much would depend on how he delivered his testimony, how well you stood up under cross-examination in very tough territory."

"And you wouldn't want the D.A. to risk his reputation on me as a witness?"

"We don't have any other witnesses. And not much in the way of corroborative evidence."

"You don't want to take this on."

"I'm not prepared to make a commitment," I said.

She looked at me, then said, "I won't let you down."

"I didn't mean that."

"I'm a good student," she said.

"I'm sure."

"How good a teacher are you?"

In the courtroom you learn that a witness who's a rug is no fun, you need the resilience, the springback of a witness who tries to parry your questions.

"I can't work with air. I need provable facts. Evidence."

"If I were dead, that would be the kind of evidence you're looking for."

"That's evidence only that you're dead. The body might show how you came to be dead, and if it wasn't from natural causes, we'd still need evidence as to who did it. Rapists don't leave fingerprints on their victims."

"I get it," she said. "Rape is an inconvenient crime. It's hard for whiz-bangs like you to lay out the meat and potatoes and know how you're going to win your case before you start. You don't like to take chances!"

"Miss Widmer, it's you who'd be taking chances. You're the one whose life is going to get pulled apart on the witness stand. Do you know how many rape cases end in conviction? Very, very few."

"It's your conviction I want right now."

"I'm not the jury."

"Juries are audiences. You're the actor who convinces them, aren't you?

Why am I sitting around taking crap from this kid?

"Mr. Thomassy," she said, "I bet you feel more comfortable with robbery or murder…"

"Yes I do!"

"You men are capable of working both sides of that street. You can rob and be robbed, you can kill, and you can be killed. But when it comes to rape we're not equal because you can rape us and we can't rape you and that's why you don't know how I feel!"

"Now take it easy."

"Easy? What are women to do? We've got this opening a thousand loonies out there are trying to get into, and most of them aren't afraid to try because men have been getting away with it for centuries. She was seducing me, they say. Look at the provocative clothes she was wearing, they say. Look at the way she was walking around half-naked, she was asking for it, they say. Right? All women ask for it. Right Mr. Thomassy?"

"Some do."

"Even supposedly nice guys like you believe those arguments. Next you'll tell me there are SM freaks who say they like to be forced. That's another lie. They like to pretend to be forced. If one of those scenes turns into a real rape, I mean an uncontrollable rape the woman can't do anything about, you'll see how quickly her kink unkinks. Nobody likes real violence done to them! And besides, we're not talking about an occasional freak with special tastes. We're talking about the great majority of women who thrive on tenderness and affection and can't get the message through to male lunkheads that we don't want to be raped any more."

"Men get raped, too," I said.

"In jail."

"Right."

"Well at least those rapists are in jail, and that's where I want Koslak!"

It was then, behind her strident syllables, I began to remember my father's voice.

Francine continued, "What do you men expect us to do if we live alone, get behind double locks on the door, not let anyone in where we live, put a sign on the door, go away, no soliciting, no neighbors, no visiting hours from anybody? Should I buy a gun? Should I use it? Or is it that you guys want me to be tempted to marry some idiot just so I won't be a vulnerable woman living alone?"

George , my father had said, you have hair above your privates, there is something you must know. Wait till your mother goes to sleep.

"And," said Francine, "what are we supposed to do out in the street, carry a machine gun?!"

I was thirteen when my father decided to have that talk with me. My mother, complaining of a headache, drifted off to bed soon after dinner. I remember I was whittling something in front of the fireplace when Papa touched my shoulder — I hadn't heard him come up behind me — and I dropped the knife with a clatter.

"Pick it up," he said.

I picked up the knife. My instant fantasy was to stick it into him.

"Close the blade," he said. I felt he could read my mind.

"Put it away, George," he said.

I pocketed it. Only then did he pull the rocking chair so that we were sitting side by side, staring into the fire, more comfortable for both of us because we could look at the fire instead of each other.

"I am going to talk to you about sex," he said in that smoke-dry voice that resonated with authority.