9

 

Wednesday morning the mayor of New Orleans announced that at a minimum hundreds, more likely thousands of people had died in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Doctors and hospital administrators, hampered by a lack of power, clean water and transportation, were overwhelmed by Katrina’s medical demands. In Baghdad, hundreds of people were trampled to death in a stampede that occurred after a mortar attack spread panic among a crowd of Shiite pilgrims crossing a bridge.

Though my drive to the office is fairly short and does not involve crossing any physical bridge, in my mind it often feels like a symbolic one: between home and work. And this time as I drove I experienced a stampede of thoughts: Libby, Andy, Margo, Chris, Libby…

My first thought of Libby came right after the weather forecast. The heat wave that had begun the previous day, with midday temperatures well in the eighties, was due to continue. I imagined that what Libby would wear when she came to my office that afternoon would be even skimpier than what it had been on Monday.

Unlike Monday’s impromptu drop-in, this time I had her scheduled for a full forty-five minute appointment. The business at hand would be unlikely to take up the full time, and so there would be some time for conversation. Then I could ask her about her memories of Andy, and perhaps tell her Barbara’s story.

It seemed fairly certain that Libby held no feelings of rancor towards Andy. If anything, she seemed rather favorably inclined toward him. The shock that she had felt on hearing about him and Peter seemed to have been just a tremor of surprise. But Andy’s heroic deed did not seem to surprise her.

I began to feel regret over my belligerent treatment of Margo. Yes, she was a manipulator; of that I no longer had any doubt. But, given that Libby was in no hurry, there was no good reason to proceed roughshod with the action without apprising Andy, and his attorney, of the circumstances.

It might be good to talk to Chris about Margo, I thought, in the context of comparing notes on our respective exes. But when I tried to think about Chris I could not evoke a visual image to go with the thought. Except that she had long black hair and was not tall, I remembered her appearance only vaguely, and what imprinted itself on the blank that I had for Chris was something like a digitally modified image of Libby, her hair darkened and straightened, her stature diminished.

It would be, then, something like a blind date. Not quite, since Chris seemed to remember me quite well. But enough to give it a quality of mystery that, for the moment, felt exciting.

 

Libby came in wearing bicycle garb, tight-fitting but not especially revealing. As she stepped into the office she was shaking loose her lush hair (which was, at the moment, the most striking thing about her), as though to relieve the pressure of the helmet that she had probably left with her bicycle.

The formal business was disposed of fairly quickly. She read the petition thoroughly but quickly before signing it. She made no comment on the fact that the references to her included her middle name, and she gave every indication of understanding every part of the petition, even though it covered several issues: paternity, succession, administration. I took it as a compliment on my ability to write in not overly legalistic prose. I asked her if she needed any explanation, and she said no. “Remember Laura’s lawyer friend that I mentioned to you? They were seeing each other back when I was in high school, and I worked part-time in his office, so I learned a little legalese.” So much for the compliment.

As I had expected, there was time for conversation – I had previously turned off my telephone’s ringer, as I normally do for appointments – and it quickly came around to the subject of Andy Stone.

“When you said, ‘That sounds like Andy,’ what did you mean?”

“He was into rescuing people. He was a ski patroller on Mount Ashland and a lifeguard on the Rogue River. He would go there on weekends and sometimes take me with him. It was fun!”

“There’s something else that might interest you. I was told by a woman who had slept with him that he mentioned you as the first woman he ever had sex with.”

“Really?” Libby’s expression showed astonishment, but did not indicate any outrage over such a preposterous lie.

“Do you believe it?”

“Well, I never would have thought so, but I do remember feeling a little surprised at how inexperienced he seemed. I mean, I was eighteen, and he was twenty-one, and I had to teach him some things.”

I wondered what those things might have been, but of course refrained from asking. She sensed my curiosity and smiled.

“Like, for example,” she went on, “that it wasn’t just about penetration. I thought that maybe it was just me, that the other girls he’d been with didn’t know any better or didn’t care. But maybe he really was inexperienced. He caught on pretty fast.” She smiled again. I remembered her describing Andy as gentle, in contrast to his even handsomer cousin Tommy the bully. “But, now that I think about it, I do remember him telling me that I was the first girl he ever loved. But I thought he meant loved as distinct from fucked, which is what he was for me. The first guy I ever loved, though I had fucked plenty.”

“By eighteen?”

“Yes.” She paused and smiled. “It isn’t anything I’m ashamed of.”

“No reason you should be.”

“I ran with a fast crowd of girls in high school, and we didn’t limit ourselves to high-school boys. I learned a lot, pretty early. That’s why I work well with teenagers. And I kept it up for the first month or two in college.”

“Until you met Andy?”

“Yes. After we split up I went back to my old habits. Then I slowed down. And that’s how my life has been. Phases.”

I was surprised by how comfortable I felt in such an intimate conversation with a woman I barely knew. But I felt that asking her, as I would have liked to, what phase she was in at the moment would breach the comfort zone.

“How did you and Andy become a couple?” I asked instead.

“I met him at a party, and I came on to him, pure and simple.”

Pure and simple. The very words that had come into my mind when I thought of Andy as a liar. I still thought of him as a liar, but perhaps not so much of one. And the capacity of any man, of any condition, persuasion or orientation, to resist a come-on by Libby Schlemmer was beyond imagining.

“Did you think of him as gay?”

“I did at first – he passed for gay – but then he told me he wasn’t really gay. I was confused. I guess I still am.” She smiled again.

I felt the need to make the conversation less personal. “What you said earlier is interesting,” I said after musing for a moment. “I’ve noticed,” I went on hesitantly, “that when I see a movie or a TV show in which sex between and man and woman – I mean consensual, recreational sex – is pretty much just penetration, with maybe some fellatio thrown in, then it often turns out that the director or the writer or the producer is a gay man.”

“That is interesting.” She paused and smiled yet again. “Maybe they’re the same ones who make the woman keep her bra on. That was another thing I had to teach Andy: to wait till I took it off, and later to take it off for me. He got pretty good at it…”

I felt a strong need to make it impersonal again. “Maybe gay men – I mean men who are basically homosexual even if they have sex with women – don’t appreciate how important a woman’s breasts are to a straight guy.” But Libby’s breasts, superbly molded by her orange jersey, seemed to be staring at me, mocking my attempt at impersonal talk.

Perhaps Libby sensed my discomfort. “Do you like talking about movies?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“So do I,” she said. What was she doing? Was she challenging me to ask her out on a coffee date to talk about movies? Or to go to the movies with her?

I dismissed the thought. I wondered if Chris liked movies, other than movies that she might take her teenage kids to.

I felt strangely pleased by the fact that I had thought of Chris while in Libby’s presence.

“Seen any good movies lately?” I asked with a laugh.

“As a matter of fact, I did,” she said without returning my laugh. “I have a friend who’s a critic, and I got to see a preview of The Constant Gardener. It’s opening tonight, and I’d recommend it.”

“I read the book,” I said. “I’ll probably like the movie. You say it’s opening tonight? On a Wednesday?”

“Yes. Probably to set it apart from the blockbusters that will open on Labor Day weekend. Quoth my critic friend,” she added with a smile.

There was a pause.

“Did I tell you that I was at Peter’s funeral?”

“You mean the memorial service?”

“Yes. I got there late. It felt so strange to see Andy. I saw you and him talking near the end. I asked someone who you were, and I found out a lot. That’s why I came here the next day.” I wondered who someone was.

“I didn’t see you,” I said.

“I can be inconspicuous if I want to be,” she said, chuckling.

“I find that hard to imagine.”

“You don’t know me yet.”

“At this point I’m not sure I know anyone, including myself!” This time we both laughed. Libby remained smiling. It might easily be said of her that she had a beautiful smile, but in the context of her spectacular beauty that would not be saying much.

It was three-thirty. “I’d better go now,” she said, shaking her head again as though readying it back for the helmet. “Bye!”

“We’ll keep in touch,” I said.

 

After Libby left I turned the ringer back on and noticed that my voicemail light was blinking. The message was from Rose. “Hi, Andy, it’s Rose. I’ve got more stuff about Andy Stone.” It suddenly struck me that, despite having Andy on my mind a good bit of the time, I had forgotten about the assignment I had given Rose.

I called Rose. She picked up and said she would call me back shortly. After ten minutes she did so.

There were no preliminaries. “You’ve heard about what our boy’s been doing of late?” she began.

“Rescuing people from New Orleans?”

“Yes, poor people with AIDS, black and white, who wouldn’t have gotten out otherwise. When he realized that there were more people than he could fit in the van he’d rented, he borrowed, or commandeered, a city bus – they aren’t running anyway – and drove about fifty people to Lafayette, where he’d rented a whole motel. It seems he’s involved with some kind of AIDS support group in Baton Rouge. And as far as I’ve been able to determine, he himself is not HIV-positive.” Rose had anticipated a question that was forming in my mind as she spoke.

“Now, to go back to the beginning,” Rose went on, “it turns out that he’s got roots in Louisiana. His mother, the former Margaret Anderson, is from Lake Charles. She was an Army nurse in Vietnam, and Andy’s father was wounded there. That’s how they met.”

“Shades of Hemingway,” I said. “A Farewell to Arms,” I added when Rose didn’t respond.

“Whatever.” Literature was not Rose’s forte. “They got married, and she moved to Oregon with him, and they had Andy. Or maybe not quite in that order – Andy’s kinfolk in Oregon aren’t so clear on that. What they are clear on is that they didn’t like Margaret – she was too foreign for them – and I would guess that they made her life miserable. Eventually she left her husband and moved back to Louisiana. Andy stayed in Oregon, because of school and friends and all that, but he went to visit his mother every so often.”

“What about the time in between?”

“That’s where it gets complicated. I located the biotech company that he went to work for. As you might have guessed, they were working on an AIDS drug, an unconventional one, and they were doing some testing in Africa, Namibia to be precise.” I thought of The Constant Gardener, which deals with a similar topic, but said nothing to Rose. “Andy went there, and then at some point he vanished from the company payroll, and from any other record that we’ve been able to locate. If you want to know any more about that, someone might have to travel to Africa.”

“I’ll have to think about that. What else have you got?”

“The last place where he was before coming here seems to have been Houston again. But there’s still a big gap. Would you like me to work on that, going backwards?”

I hesitated for a moment. “Yes,” I finally said, with a conviction that grew in the course of my saying it. What motivated it was the probability that I would end up knowing more about Andy Stone than Margo, his attorney. “Yes, go ahead, Rose. And thanks for your work so far!”

“You’ve got it. See you at the picnic on Saturday!”

 

Wednesday evening the fog rolled in, and the brief hot spell was over. Thursday morning was cloudy and cool.

The multifaceted petition by Elizabeth Perino Schlemmer in re the Estate of Peter Marshall Hart, with all its supporting documentation attached, and with the requisite number of photocopies made, was ready by noon. But I decided to postpone filing it until the next day, when I would combine the trip to the Courthouse with a walk to the Financial District. I called the Wells Fargo trust department and arranged for a meeting with the banker in charge of Peter’s assets. It would be at three o’clock on Friday. However long it might take, realistically, it would leave enough time to get home and get myself ready for Chris.

After signing the checks that Diane had prepared for me – it was the first day of the month – I spent most of Thursday afternoon working on various pending cases. A new client, another wealthy man seeking a divorce, was due at four-thirty. He had been referred to me by the software developer. Perhaps he was one himself. I could not summon much enthusiasm for the appointment.

I thought back to The Constant Gardener, and pondered the possibility of going to see the movie in the evening.

The software developer’s friend turned out to be a writer who had been published in The New Yorker and the like, and who had made money writing software manuals. The problem was that he had written most of them in varying degrees of cooperation with his soon-to-be ex-wife, and the apportionment of the income would be a delicate matter. But he was a witty and cultured man, and I enjoyed the meeting, which lasted until almost six o’clock.

When I got home I found the latest New Yorker in my mail. I decided to stay at home and read it. If a dating relationship should develop with Chris, and if she liked movies, then I would go to see The Constant Gardener with her.

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