June 29, 2001.

He Did It.

ARTHUR DID HIS BEST to escape from the Sterns' overdone offices alone, but Muriel and Larry arrived while he was still awaiting the elevator, and in neutered silence the three stood in front of the crafted bra.s.s doors. Muriel eventually said something about filing a motion to dismiss in the Court of Appeals, but Arthur did not have the stuff to respond, or even to listen. He let them go down ahead of him when the first car arrived.

A few minutes later, he reached the entry to the Towers, where a fan of steel and gla.s.s swelling overhead offered protection from a sudden summer downpour. Arthur peered out, then walked into the rain, traveling more than a block before he noticed he was getting wet. He ducked into the doorway of another Center City building and then, after a moment in which he once more fell into agitated reflection, started through the storm again. He had to get back to the office. He had to tell Pamela. It occurred to him, in time, that he was hungry and weary and needed to pee. Yet as he was pelted, all he could hold in mind was Mrs. Carriere's final answer. Your client. Mr. Gandolph. He chewed her words down to a vile, indigestible remnant, until he felt obliged to accept the obvious and find dry ground. Then in a few minutes, he was hurtling forward again, walking out of desperation, as if, in another location, her testimony might mean something else.

By now, Rommy existed in his mind solely as a woebegone innocent"and more important, he himself as the valiant champion of a just and miraculous cause. If Rommy was guilty, then Arthur's world was different and gloomier, a place he had grown convinced he was no longer required to inhabit. Life again would be only hard work and duty.

Eventually, he found himself in front of Morton's. Desperate by now, he stepped in, intending to look for the men's room, but once through the doors he thought of Gillian, inspired by a peripheral impression of her fox-colored hair. Approaching the cosmetics counter, he saw no sign of her. He was sure it had been an illusion when she suddenly reared up before him, after replacing stock in the drawers below.

"Arthur." Gillian stepped back with a long hand lying over her collar.

"He did it," said Arthur. "I thought you should know. Muriel will leak it to everybody. You'll hear soon. But he did it."

"Who did?"

"My client. Rommy. He's guilty."

Gillian emerged through a small hatchway in the counter. She took Arthur by the elbow, as she might a wandering child.

"What do you mean, 'He's guilty'?"

Arthur described the deposition. "I can't figure any of it out right now," he said. "I feel like my brain's been in the microwave or something. Where's the washroom?"

She called to a colleague that she was taking her break, then steered him along, offering to hold on to his briefcase. Down the escalator was a coffee bar where she would wait for him.

A few minutes later, hoping to calm himself, Arthur took stock in front of the mirror over the bathroom sinks. His hair had more or less washed off his head and, under the intense fluorescents, looked like an ink spill. His gray suit was soaked black across the shoulders. No wonder Gillian had jumped at the sight of him. He looked like a homeless person rolled out of a gutter.

Outside, he briefly phoned Pamela, a.s.suring her that the news was every bit as bad as it sounded, then rode the escalator down to the small coffee bar Morton's had recently opened in the bas.e.m.e.nt as yet another lure to keep customers in the store. The effort was working well today. Although lunch was long over, most of the small white tables were occupied by ladies waiting out the rainstorm, with their shopping bags beside their knees.

A few feet ahead, Gillian sat with her back to him, finishing a cigarette. If nothing else, the sight of her removed him somewhat from the shock of Mrs. Carriere. In spite of his growing chill, and his current confusion, Gillian, as a figure, continued to inspire in him both excitement and hunger. But he could not pretend she had not achieved some of what she intended with her revelations the last time he saw her. It was the vision of a demonized teenager, applying cigarettes to her flesh, which had haunted him. He could see her, very pale and thin, pushing the ember against the sensitive region inside her arm, and all along maintaining a solemn face despite the pain and the hideous pungency of her own smoking flesh.

Returning now, that image stopped Arthur in his tracks. He knew himself as a person of endless unsatisfied dreams. But overlaying the creature in perpetual adolescence was the man he had become in his thirties, neither a child nor a fool, someone who had begun to learn from his mistakes instead of repeating them to the point of infinity, someone who now could not only curb his yearnings but even leave them behind. In the last week and a half when he took a reprieve from work in the office to stare at the river, he had thought often of Gillian. Yes his heart swelled, yes he a.n.a.lyzed his conversations with her until they no longer remained intact in his memory, having grown jumbled with the sly interjections he imagined from himself thanks to the high-revving motor of his fantasies. But then his pulse slowed with a sense of the true risks facing him. He knew longing well, but he was less schooled in heartbreak.

His divorce had been devastating. But he had married Maijya largely because she would have him. She was very pretty. And certainly bright. And Arthur was unrelievedly h.o.r.n.y. But he did not live one of the forty or so days they spent together feeling he understood the first thing about her. He could not get her to close the door to the john, or to take pleasure in most American food. Who could have told him how hard it was to explain yourself to someone who'd grown up without a television set, who had only a vague idea of who Richard Nixon was, let alone Farrah Fawcett or Rubik's Cube? Every instant was a surprise"especially the final one when she said she was leaving him for a countryman, a tile fitter no less.

How could she just abandon him, he asked, their life?

'Ziss?' she replied. 'Ziss is nossink.'

That had been bad. But Gillian, as someone he aspired to in such an exalted way, no matter how foolishly, posed a danger far beyond what Maijya had wrought. In this world, he had next to nothing. But there was his Self" his fragile soul. A person as smashed and compromised as Gillian, a person who had been so conquered by her devils she could succ.u.mb to drunkenness and criminality and incestuous love and G.o.d knows what else"someone like that was as unpredictable as Susan. He had told Gillian he was not frightened of her. That had been dashing"and foolhardy. Afterwards, he had realized it was not wholly true. In the late afternoons, when he turned from his desk and let his mind escape on the scales of orange light on the river, the thought of Gillian also brought a cool realization of the way love could become a catastrophe.

Standing still in the store bas.e.m.e.nt, he thought it all through one more time. Then he continued ahead. He could only be himself, which meant pursuing the chance, no matter how slight, to be with someone he dreamed of, to vault the unconquerable distance between what lived only in his mind and what actually was. Like food and health and shelter, everyone, he believed, was ent.i.tled to that.

While Arthur was gone, Gillian sat at the little white table and went through several cigarettes. Recently, she had been holding to less than a pack a day, but by now it had become a virtual certainty that her encounters with Arthur would shake her. The disruptions often seemed worthwhile in their way, but she still needed to be fortified by nicotine. She'd quit smoking in law school, and started again only at Hazelden, where she was hospitalized while she kicked. At the NarcAnon meetings there, everyone seemed to have a cigarette between their fingers. She knew she'd traded one addiction for another, the new one nearly as lethal, and less fun, but such were the terms of a life to be lived one day at a time.

Turning around, she caught sight of Arthur wandering back, very much lost in himself. She had something important to say to him and did not even wait for him to sit down.

"You shouldn't give up, Arthur."

His mouth drooped open as he sank to a seat.

"I have no right to give you advice," she said. "But let me. You've done too much good work. If there's one undiscovered witness, then there may be others."

Initially, as she'd awaited Arthur, she had felt troubled for his sake. After visiting Arthur in his home, after meeting Susan, after listening to his adoring accounts of his father, she wished for the light of something wonderful to shine on Arthur, because, quite simply, he deserved it. Losing Gandolph's case would be an undeserved blow.

But what brought her face-to-face with the Gillian who was so frequently a shock to herself was her own fierce disappointment at Arthur's news. Everyone who had made a life in the criminal courts knew that defendants generally deserved their punishment. But as she'd sat smoking without interruption, the ash deepening in the little foil tray on the table, she had gradually"and calmly"recognized that she had wanted Rommy Gandolph to go free. She had wanted her judgment of him to be, like so many other judgments of that period, recognized as an error. And reversed. For today she finally understood: she equated a new life for Rommy Gandolph with her own renaissance. And she had depended on Arthur, that paragon of sincerity, as her knight errant. Because that was Arthur. Dependable. And virtuous. Perhaps what was most startling was that she was unprepared to let go. She felt no duty to explain her motives, but she remained determined to revive him.

"The problem," he said, "is I believed Genevieve. She really didn't want to say it."

"And you believed Erno, too. Do you think now that he was lying?" He did not appear to have considered that. "You need time, Arthur. To talk to your client. And Erno."

"Right."

"Don't give up." She reached forward and clasped both of his hands. She smiled this time and, a bit childishly, he seemed to reflect her encouragement. He nodded, then bundled his arms against his body. He was freezing to death, he said, and needed to get home to change. She had no trouble believing that; his hands had been like marble.

"Forgive me, Arthur, but looking at you, I wonder if you can keep your mind on the road. Am I being too much of a granny?"

"Probably not. I'll take a taxi."

"You'll be lucky to find one in the rain. Where's your car? I could drive. I've been practicing a bit with Duffy's station wagon. And I have my lunch and dinner hours coming."

Arthur appeared muddled. From a house phone, she called Ralph, her boss, who told her to take her time. He expected little trade in light of the storm.

"Come along, Arthur," she said. "Worrying about your fine automobile in my hands will keep your mind off your troubles."

Arthur's monthly s.p.a.ce was half a block down, which they reached through a series of bas.e.m.e.nt arcades connecting the buildings. The lot was under one of the newer skysc.r.a.pers, and exited onto Lower River, a parkway that ran beneath River Drive above. Newcomers to the city could never make sense of the road, and Gillian, who hadn't been down here in a decade, was not much better off. Lower River had been designed to move trucks off the Center City streets, allowing them access to the loading docks of the big buildings. It worked well for that purpose, but the roadway was tortuous and the environment surreal. Sodium lights glowed down here twenty-four hours a day, and over the years, the homeless had made this their chief refuge. The wilted cartons and soiled, spring-shot mattresses where they slept were piled into the recesses between the concrete b.u.t.tresses supporting River Drive. Rain dribbled down between the seams in the street overhead, while grimy men in ragged clothes loitered between the roadside pillars, looking, at best, like creatures from Les Miserables, if not The Gates of h.e.l.l.

In the car, Arthur remained focused on today's catastrophe.

"Do you feel vindicated?" he asked.

"Not at all, Arthur," she said with some vehemence. "In no way."

"Really? After the beating you've taken in the papers, I thought you'd be bitter."

"In that case it was courageous of you to come and tell me this yourself. Frankly, I'd rather thought I'd heard the last from you, Arthur."

Gillian drove with the hesitance of the elderly, jiggling the wheel and braking too often, watching the shining pavement in the same fixed way she would a minefield. Nonetheless, when they coasted to a light, she permitted herself a sideward glance. In Arthur's present state of mind, it seemed to take him a while to understand she was alluding to what she'd told him about her brother in their last conversation.

"More the reverse," he said then. "I thought I might have offended you by what I said when you got out of the car."

"Oh, I'm sure you were right about that, Arthur. I probably was trying to adjust your high opinion of me."

"You arrange everything so n.o.body has a chance with you. You know that, don't you?"

She became aware in a moment of how tightly she was gripping the steering wheel.

"I've heard that before," she told him. "That doesn't mean my warnings aren't to good effect, Arthur. It probably justifies them."

"Right," he said. "I've heard all your caveats. But I never imagined you were faultless, Gillian. Just appealing."

"Appealing? How so?"

She could feel him staring. They were getting close to his apartment and Arthur's final directions were issued in a bristling tone. Plainly, he was irritated with her for putting him on the spot. But he answered.

"I think you're very smart and very beautiful, the same thing everybody else has always thought, Gillian. You know what bells you set off, don't pretend you don't."

"You mean s.e.xually appealing," she said. Being behind the wheel seemed to allow for bluntness. Or perhaps it was just her faultless instinct for keeping everyone at bay. But she thought she had a point.

"You sound like you resent that. It's a fact of life, isn't it?"

Arthur gestured to the old brick three-flat, and Gillian pulled the car to the curb with a sense of relief. She faced him now.

"But that's the root of it, isn't it? s.e.x?"

Pained, he screwed up his face. He was regretting everything. She could see it. This conversation. Anything else he had said that had exposed him to her uncivil tongue.

"Really," he said, "what would be so wrong if I said yes? You want to reduce it to the basics? Sure, I'd like to make love to you. Eventually. You're a very attractive woman. I'm a man. It's pneumatics and instinct. I mean, I don't think that's going to happen today"or tomorrow, or anytime in the near future. I'd like to know you. I'd like you to know me. I'd love you to know me and like me so much that you'd want that to happen. You can make fun of that, too, Gillian." He opened the car door, and she reached after him.

"I'm not making fun, Arthur. I have a point."

"About?"

"What was your word. 'A crush'? You're grasping after your own images. From eons ago. You don't see me as I am, Arthur."

"Maybe I see you more clearly than you see yourself."

"There's a great deal you don't know, Arthur." She looked down the street, overhung by the stout arms of large old elms, hardy survivors in full leaf. Beneath them, the rain had dwindled to a few drops. The word 'heroin' was on her lips, but her motive for telling that story would be immediately suspect, taken, like her revelation about Carl, as yet another dramatic warning shot meant to hold Arthur at arm's length. "A great deal," she repeated. "And it frightens me."

"Because?"

"Because it's inevitable that you'll be disappointed. I'll feel like a villain and you'll be far more dashed than you imagine."

"Well then, that will be my problem," he said. He pushed the door wider. "Look, I'm sick of this conversation. I'm sick of you telling me what to want. You're ent.i.tled to say no. I've heard it before, and I haven't jumped off any bridges yet. So say no, once and for all, and let's get this over with. But stop acting like a tease."

"I don't want to say no," she answered. The words froze her heart. Arthur, too, looked taken aback. Gillian stared through the windshield, spotted with rain, suddenly bewildered and frightened, then, with nothing else to say, asked him if the car was okay as it was.

"Fine," he said. "Come on up. I'll give you a magazine and a cold drink while I change."

As his father probably had, Arthur kept the shades on the southern windows drawn in the summer, and today the dim apartment had an elderly smell, undusted, with cooking odors greased into the wallpaper and plaster.

Like her, he seemed unsettled by the conversation they'd just had, and he traveled around nervously, turning up each of the window air conditioners. He asked what she wanted to drink and then immediately corrected himself.

"I mean, a soft drink. Only I don't know what's in the fridge." He started in that direction, but she said she was fine. "Right," he said. "I won't be a minute." He stared, then without another word disappeared into his bedroom and closed the door.

She stood alone in the living room several minutes. From the bedroom, she could hear drawers slamming as Arthur hastily shed his clothes. Eventually, she turned to the window and lifted the shade. In the sky, there was suddenly an inkling of sun. Arthur Raven, she thought. Who could imagine? But even at that, a shiver of delight penetrated her. This was why it was worth getting up every day. Because life could still hatch surprises. She went then and rapped firmly on the center panel of the dark bedroom door.

"May I come in, Arthur?" she asked.

He cracked the door and peeked out. He asked her to repeat what she'd said and she did.

"Why?" he asked.

She looked at him.

"Oh, please," he said. "So you can prove to me it's not worth all the drama?"

He might have been right at that. She seemed embarked on one of those moments of numb action that had gotten her into so much trouble over the years. But she'd been right to contend that this relationship could never stand the light of day. A shuttered boudoir was the only place it could be conducted in earnest.

"Arthur, don't play hard to get. I doubt I'll have the courage to do this again." She inched her way over the threshold and kissed him. It was dry and cold and unimpressive, even for a first effort. But it served to make the point. When he stood back, he was wearing only his wet socks.

"How should this go, Arthur?"

He looked at her bleakly. "Slowly," he said.

He kissed her now, not much better than the first time, and took her hand and led her to the bed. He drew the shades fully, darkening the room. He spoke to her without daring to look at her.

"You take off your clothes. And then let's sit next to each other. Just sit here."

She undressed with her back to him. She folded her clothes and left them on a chair and sat again, then felt the bed sag with his weight. He was close enough that she felt his thick thigh brushing her flank. She glanced down, almost against her will, and saw his organ already pointing between his thighs. She knew in Arthur both tenderness and greed. She could not guess which would prevail. Probably, if she drew a picture, she'd expect him to maul her. But she'd committed herself to this. It was a leap into darkness.

Nothing happened at first. It was still afternoon and the daylight seemed to soften the sounds from outside. With the end of the rain, bugs were sawing away in the trees and a bus snored off blocks away.

After a few minutes, she felt his fingertips on her thigh. He touched her slowly. He touched her knee. He lightly touched her back and her shoulders. He touched her neck. As he'd promised, he moved slowly. By the time he touched her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, her nipples had peaked. He kissed her then"her shoulders, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. He kissed her mouth briefly and then worked his way downward. He parted her knees and with time brought his mouth against her there. After circling forever, he dove farther inside.

For a moment then, she opened her eyes to the sight below of Arthur Raven's shiny scalp. Several of his dwindling hairs were standing up straight as a rooster's comb, and she had to choke back the fatal impulse to laugh. She hung there an instant, coldly conscious, lecturing herself although there were no particular words, but wanting the right thing, endeavoring only to feel, and sinking slowly toward the well of sensation. A few times she rose back up, but she escaped more willingly on each occasion, until, by the time he was inside her, she had finally joined herself to the pleasure. This was life, she thought then. These sensations, so long gone, were the river that fed that lost thing called life. She rode upward on the silvery current and could not even remember reaching out to him, but they were bound now, her head crushed to his shoulder, her legs locked behind him, as her body responded in equal reflection of his rhythm.

Afterwards, he opened the blinds to let some light into the room. She shielded her eyes, but felt the full weight of his vision as he stood nearby and examined her.

"You are very beautiful," he said.

"I'm one of those women, Arthur, who looks her best in clothing." She had spent many hours in self-a.s.sessment and knew what he saw. She was freckled, with long limbs and shallow b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and so pale that her shanks looked almost blue.

As for Arthur, he was not purely the man he appeared. He was drooping in the middle, but he had actually spent some of his lonely hours keeping fit. His round shape was more the result of a rib cage so bowed it resembled a helmet. He had thin hips and birdy little legs, and beautiful, strong arms. He was also the hairiest man she'd ever seen. Without his clothes, he somehow seemed spry and quick. In retraction, his male organ glimmered amid the forest like a bulb. It was like the rest of Arthur, thicker than some, but not long. He was beside the bed, studying her, and she reached out and then brought herself forward and put the whole thing in her mouth. It grew larger for a while.

"Not yet," he said.

But she was not ready to release him. She worked at it with a deliberate tenderness, the tenderness he had shown her, until he was fully erect again, then she ran his p.e.n.i.s like a wand, across the ridges of her face, her eyes, her cheeks, her mouth, then took him in again. When he fell down beside her this time, he slept.

She found a coverlet at the foot of the bed and lay within it, staring at the old ceiling fixture, a frosted square of brain-dead '50s design, reviewing the sensations in her own mind. She had not realized he was awake when he spoke to her again, some time later.

"The Bible has it right."

"The Bible? Is that what you're thinking about, Arthur?"

"I am."