Sol Stein - Other people

I was beat. It was after 3:00 A.M. I wasn't up to conversation. Maybe the old man was scared. Half a cup of coffee was probably a good idea anyway. I double-parked.

"That's all right," said Koch. "Everybody double-parks here."

He showed me the disarray in his study. It was a mess, particularly near the door, where the man had slumped. He pointed to where the bullet had gone into the wall.

"Perhaps my Saturday cleaning woman can come tomorrow," he said. "If I can find her. I will have to see patients in the living room. This has to be cleaned before I can see patients in here."

He started to push one of the file drawers back in and I said, "Don't." I startled him. I guess I said it too sharply. "I think I'd better send a forensic photographer up here in the morning. The police didn't take pictures, did they?"

"No."

"It'll cost, but it's worth it in case I don't get this dismissed."

"What does that mean?"

"Nothing to worry about. Leave it to me."

In his kitchen I watched him empty a small paper bag of beans into a hand grinder. He passed the shallow dish of powdered beans in front of my nose. I had to agree the aroma was pleasing. He then dripped hot water through them and offered me exactly what I had asked for, half a cup.

"I won't join you, if you don't mind," he said. "It'll be hard enough to sleep as it is. I wonder how that poor man is doing. The one I hurt."

"I can check for you tomorrow if you'd like to know."

"Oh don't bother yourself."

"No bother. Just a phone call. This coffee tastes as good as the aroma of the beans promised. What is it?"

"Ethiopian Harrar. Zabar's has it sometimes. How old did you tell me you were?"

"I'm forty-four. Why do you ask?"

"Do you think Francine Widmer is in love with you?"

"I wouldn't say that."

"Well, I am saying it. You see—" Koch hesitated just a second — "I also have an inordinate response to her."

I sipped at the coffee.

"That makes two of us," he continued, "with the combined ages—" he laughed — "of one hundred and four, in love with a twenty-seven-year-old. In China they used to venerate age because it represented the wisdom of experience. In Europe, maturity still is respected a bit. In this country, age is despised. America may become a terrible country as the population gets older and older."

I stood up. "Time to go."

"Thank you for coming up. May I give you my check for the bail while you are here?"

"Just mail it to me."

He extended his hand in a warm, sure grip.

"I am not a serious rival," he said. "Except here." And he pointed to his leonine head. "Good night."

I found Francine asleep on top of my bed, her knees drawn up, her two hands under her cheek, a naked child. I rejected the child in me when I was still a child, Koch would say. He'd say that because my father refused to venture out into America, I'd have to do it for both of us. I am my father's keeper. I am my own keeper. I don't need anybody. Not that body on my bed. I have kept myself free of family tyranny by staying single, not fathering any tadpole of my own, observing the bodies of innumerable women the way I am watching her now, from a distance, objects in a Sears catalogue, tools to play with for a week or a season. They went home, sooner or later, to the rest of their lives.

Looking at her lying there contently asleep, I thought how recently I've come to understand about the bodies of women. When you're young, you're exposed to enough locker rooms to know in a few years' time that no two men undressed look alike, and that most parts of most men are pretty damn funny if you don't look at them with loving eyes. But we stereotype the women according to what Francine's father would call the paradigm of an age. Not the rotundness of the Renoirs or of the Latin American women, but the sleek, flat-tummied, long-legged look-alikes who can be photographed almost wholly nude, with or without body make-up, and seem to women as enticing to men, and yet I've never dated a woman who filled the prescription flawlessly. There are always the too-thin eyebrows, the few long hairs growing from the areola, the butt that naked is a bit too big, the thighs that wrinkle a bit from fat that will not come off with exercise. The thing about Francine is that I note those minor imperfections as I did with the others and have feelings about them because they are part of the whole of her. Love isn't blind, and it isn't tolerant. It is encompassing. It doesn't make virtues out of warts, it makes them part of an overwhelming affection for the corpus that envelops the vital organs of someone whom you unreasonably love. When love strikes, reason becomes inoperative. When it becomes operative again, it is probably a sign that that particular love is on the wane, or settling for the kind of lifelong affection and attachment in which warts are condoned.

And it's not just the physical appearances that work that way. I've never known a woman for long who did not, on some occasion, have a breath temporarily worth avoiding. Or one who did not, in the middle of some night, let some flatulence escape. Where is the woman whose stomach does not percolate like a chemistry beaker if you put your ear to it. It could happen with a one-night stand, or during an affair. You can count on these demonstrations that the woman is alive. But when you love the person, the effect of all these demonstrations is different. They are less to be observed and noted than your own breath, which, when foul, you tolerate less. Love is what, acceptance?

Love puts you in a dangerous magnetic field. You can be anywhere, she can be anywhere, the field of force operates. If you can't close the field with your arms, the pain can be exquisite. The operator of person-to-person radar, a force stronger than conscience. It isn't commitment, a conscious act, but a gravitational pull that works your heart, your adrenaline, your breathing, and your balls. Thomassy, don't ruminate, I tell myself, it's not your style. You're used to cases that conclude. Love — even if experience and statistics show how very often it slackens and disappears — is at the time seemingly unending. It's a new experience for you. Don't knock it. Enjoy it.

Francine stirred, opened her eyes, stretched, saw herself naked, and pulled the sheet and blanket up to her chin.

"You could have covered me," she said.

"Not a chance," I answered.

When I was a young man I would have dismissed the notion of precognition as unsuitable for discussion. Buck Rogers was fiction. Laser beams were comic book devices. Men flew, but not in space. You see how the very science I accepted with faith has now turned me into Square Alice at the Mad Hatter's table. Today, young people like Francine take precognition for granted, as the Greeks did. The period in which rationalism flourished was historically short. It was a comfortable period for well-brought-up people. Then the carpet was yanked.

It was thoughts such as these that I brought with me to the meeting in Lefkowitz's office because I did in fact have a clear precognition that it would be a remarkable meeting. Francine was to be there, and her attorney, of course.

Once upon a time the bride was brought by the father, but on this occasion I arrived in the anteroom alone, minutes before Francine arrived with Thomassy. My thought was that they had come straight from their shared pillow. Then I thought the pillow had most probably been under her hips.

We greeted each other with inane pleasantries, and were spared the possibility of extended conversation by being ushered into the disappointing presence. Lefkowitz, a rotund young man, attempted to conceal his incipient corpulence with a vest; the Phi Beta Kappa key and chain across it merely called attention to the concealment. Of course I was prejudiced. This young assistant district attorney, undoubtedly with political ambitions, was probably from a recently well-to-do background, unmistakably Jewish in his physiognomy as well as name. He deferred to Thomassy a bit too much. He called me sir, but his gesture to take a seat was casual; with Thomassy, I thought he would put the chair under the man. He designated Francine as the most minor of his visitors by giving her a chair to one side, as if he expected her to be an auditor only.