Gail Bowen - The Endless Knot

Zack chuckled. “I have to admit, I’m grateful. If you’d been sitting in that chair, I would have been in a lot more trouble.”

“You think I don’t know that,” Linda said.

“Would you believe me if I said I wish you’d been able to finish the case?”

Linda glared at him. “I had a virus, not a lobotomy. Anyway, enough shop talk. We’re boring Joanne.”

“Not at all,” I said. “Just prepare to hear your thoughts about Mr. Severight on NationTV tomorrow night.”

The waiter set down our salads: arugula and watercress served with smoked whitefish and roasted peppers. Zack and I dug in, but Linda just gazed at her plate.

“Aren’t you going to eat that?” Zack asked.

“No,” Linda said. “It looks tasty, but my malaise makes everything taste like cardboard.”

“Give it to Jo, then,” Zack said. “She loves smoked whitefish.”

Linda pushed her plate towards me. “Be my guest,” she said. “Consider it a thank you for the dartboard and the lovely photograph of our friend here. It’s brought me hours of pleasure.”

Zack put his arm around me. “I told you she’d like it.”

Linda observed us with interest. “How long have you two been a couple?”

“Not long enough,” Zack said.

“Three and a half months,” I said.

Linda gave Zack the thumbs-up sign. “Way to go. That’s three months, thirteen and a half days, and about eleven hours longer than most of your relationships.”

There were eight of us at table, and for the rest of the meal we chatted about the inconsequential and pleasant topics that people talk about when the food and wine are excellent and the mood is mellow. After the chocolate mousse had been served and the coffee poured, a string quartet began to play “The Lark.” I drank in the beauty of the music and of the small white tulips in our centrepiece and felt the pieces of myself knitting together again. Zack leaned close and whispered, “You look happy again.”

“I am happy again,” I said.

“Then so am I,” he said, and we sat hand in hand and listened to Haydn, and all was right with our world.

Before the speeches started, I excused myself and went to the ladies’ room. As I was freshening my makeup, a blonde wearing a very short emerald dress caught my eye in the mirror. Her mascara was smudged and she was having trouble focusing. She had, it appeared, drunk well if not wisely.

“So you’re Zack’s latest,” she said.

I met her mirror gaze. “I am,” I said, reaching for my lip liner.

The blonde reached into a sequined evening bag and found her lipstick. “He’s a son of a bitch,” she said. “And he’ll dump you.” She began outlining her lips, overshooting the mark in more than a few places. I didn’t bring the matter to her attention. “He’ll be classy about it,” she said. “There’ll be some serious flowers and a handwritten note, but he’ll never call again.”

“I’ll take my chances,” I said.

“Caveat emptor . Don’t say you weren’t warned. One way or another, Zack has fucked 90 per cent of the people at this dinner tonight.”

I turned to her. “Are you through?” I asked. “Because the man I love is about to give a speech and I’d like to be there.”

“The man you love,” she repeated. “I am impressed. Is the man you love still into threesomes?”

“He doesn’t need a threesome,” I said. “He has me.”

As exit lines went, it wasn’t bad, but my heart was pounding, and the walk back to the ballroom seemed agonizingly long. I slid into my place at the table just as Zack was about to speak. When he saw that I was seated, he gave me a conspiratorial grin and began. He opened with Mel Brooks’s trenchant observation about retirement: “ ‘Never retire! Do what you do and keep doing it. But don’t do it on Friday. Take Friday off. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, do fishing, do sexual activities, watch Fred Astaire movies … My point is: Live fully and don’t retreat.’ ” It was a good opening and it got a laugh. When Zack moved to a more measured assessment of the accomplishments of the retiring dean, his comments were gracious and touching.

When my life had centred on politics, I’d written more than my share of speeches, and I knew Zack’s speech had been effective, yet the applause when he was through was oddly grudging. I glanced around the room and I noticed that the faces of the guests were closed. They had enjoyed the speech, but they didn’t like the speaker. For the first time it occurred to me that Marnie Dowhanuik’s assessment of her son might also be true of Zack – that like Charlie, Zack was a man who had fans, not friends. Both were men who needed to win and that meant they would always be surrounded by people they’d beaten. Remembering the blonde’s cutting appraisal of Zack, I felt a chill.

We were silent as the elevator took us to our suite. Once we were inside, Zack turned to me. “So what happened?” he said. “You were happy again, and now you’re not.”

“Let’s get some sleep,” I said. “We can talk about it tomorrow.”

“Uh-uh,” Zack said. “Not if it means you sleep on one side of the bed and I sleep on the other. Why don’t I make us some tea and we’ll talk about what’s bugging you?”

There was a table and chairs in front of the window that overlooked the hotel’s formal gardens. In gentle weather, brides and grooms would exchange vows in those gardens and sip champagne under the cherry trees. Now, in mid-October, the lawns were leaf-strewn and the trees were spectral. Symbols everywhere.

Zack wheeled over, picked up the basket of teas the hotel supplied, and brought it to me. “A cornucopia of possibilities,” he said. “What’s your pleasure?”

“Camomile,” I said.

Zack started the tea and came back to me. “Your turn for a good deed now. Can you untie this damn tie?” I untied it and handed it to him. “Thanks. Now, why don’t you tell me what’s wrong.”

“When I went to the powder room tonight, I had an unpleasant encounter with an old girlfriend of yours.”

“Who was it?”

“I didn’t catch her name. She’s blonde. She was wearing a very short green dress, and she has amazing legs.”

“Margot Wright,” Zack said. “She’s with Ireland Leontowich.”

“Another lawyer.”

“They’re everywhere,” Zack said. “And I like your legs. Anyway, Margot and I saw each other for a while and then we broke it off. End of story.”

“It wasn’t the end of the story for Margot. She’s still steaming.”

“So what did she say?”

“She said you were a son of a bitch. I let that slide. Then she said that one way or another, you’d fucked 90 per cent of the people who were at the dinner tonight. And I let that slide. Then she asked if you were still into threesomes.”

“And you didn’t let that slide.”

“No, I said you didn’t need threesomes because you had me.”

“Sounds like you handled the situation.” He stroked my cheek. “But you’re not happy, so what Margot said must have got to you.”

“Yes, I guess it did.”

“Which part?”

“All of it.”

“You want people to like me.”

“It sounds stupid when you say it, but yes, I do.”

“Jo, with a couple of exceptions, the people in that room weren’t my friends, they were competitors or adversaries. It doesn’t matter if they like me. What does matter is that they respect me because that means that, a lot of the time, they’ll settle rather than face me in court. And, believe it or not, that’s good news for everybody.”

“I understand that. What I don’t understand is why you have to play so hard to win.”

“Because that’s the way I am. I’m like that guy in Candide . ‘I’m neither pure nor wise nor good, but I do the best I can’ – for my clients, for my friends, and, if you’ll let me, for you. I’ve never lied to you, Jo, and I’m not going to lie about what Margot said. There were threesomes. You may have noticed that the mechanics of sex don’t always work for me. Three-ways with interesting partners helped for a while. But what you told Margot was true. As long as I have you, I don’t need anybody else. I’ve loved you since the night we had dinner at The Stone House. You reached over and took my hand, and for me, that was it. If what Margot said has screwed us up, I won’t know what to do next.”