"How so?" Volpe's response was immediate.

"She-has a cruel streak. She fantasizes, and-"

"You think only adolescents are cruel, Mr. C.?"

Mr. C.! Was this mockery, or an awkward form of deference? Or was it playful, even seductive? With Naomi Volpe-who'd asked Roger please to call her simply "Volpe"-you couldn't know.

"Of course not. But there's a particular sort of unthinking adolescent cruelty, that seems not to be connected with a sense of reality, and responsibility." Roger was thinking of Robin's teasing accusation that Adam Berendt had "touched" her. "Touched" her! The whimsicality of it. The treachery. Just a hypothesis, Dad. See? But Roger hadn't seen. In Robin's wish to harm him she'd have sacrificed Adam Berendt whom, Roger believed, she'd truly loved. He said, "It's painful to concede that maybe your own offspring isn't-fair-minded. Isn't 'nice.' "

"And you yourself are? "

A born lawyer, this Volpe. Except she wasn't. She was only a paralegal.

Practically, Roger was thinking, a menial. Yet she had the lawyer's instinct for relentless confrontation, interrogation. A fired-up lawyer is like a buzz saw: get too close to the spinning blade, you'll be shredded. But Roger Cavanagh was accustomed to being the buzz saw, not its victim.

Roger said, deflecting the question, "Robin has demonized me, in her imagination, and I have no idea why."

Volpe was lighting a cigarette, exhaling smoke out her window. She laughed. "No, Mr. C. Probably you wouldn't."

Roger said, annoyed, "You've had experience with daughters?"

"Have I! I was a daughter myself for sixteen years."

" 'Was'? Are your parents dead?"

"Dead to me."

Roger shivered.

This paralegal Volpe was a sledgehammer of a female, though hardly more than five feet tall and one of the newer staff members at the Project.

She was claimed to be "very experienced" in assisting with death penalty cases; she'd worked in Texas, the heart of U.S. executions. She lived in Jersey City and commuted to East *th Street, Manhattan. She wore mostly black clothes, sexy gay-boy attire: long-sleeved shirts tucked into trousers that outlined her round, hard little buttocks, black leather lace-up boots.

A black leather coat. You could stare at her (as, half-consciously, Roger

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had done) and not know if Volpe was attractive or plain. Or if she believed herself attractive, or plain. Her mouth was so small as to appear invisible except when she smiled broadly, showing a flash of ferret-teeth. Her gravelly laughter was the obverse of infectious: a jeering sound to put you on the alert. Is she laughing at me? Roger half admired Volpe's wiry little-boy-body with its unexpected, somehow perverse breasts like rocks shoved up inside her tight clothes. And her hair! It was a sleek dark brown, shaved up the back of her head yet spiky on the sides and top, moussed, or oiled, to give the feisty little woman a look, surely unintended, of a cartoon character who has stuck a toe into an electric outlet. Her skin looked smudged as if with a dirty eraser. Her eyes too looked smudged. Both ears glittered with studs and rings and there was a silver ring in her left nostril that gave her an aboriginal ferocity. She was much younger than Roger Cavanagh yet seemed to him not-young; there was nothing girlish about her, and certainly nothing charming. Even in repose her forehead was lined; her eyebrows were dark, heavy, quizzical. When Roger was first introduced to her she'd said, "Mr. Cavanagh of Salthill-on-Hudson. An honor." Roger hadn't wanted to think the paralegal was being ironic.

On this drive into New Jersey, they were becoming acquainted. Volpe confided in Roger that she'd been admitted to several top law schools and had started at NYU but dropped out, too much bullshit, torts, motions, briefs, judges' rulings and precedents, nobody gave a damn about justice, no attention paid to the ethical life. But now she wished she'd gotten her degree, you had to be a lawyer to have some effect upon this "shitty consumer society" where everything was for sale, especially justice. Roger guessed that Volpe hadn't done well in law school. She was smart, obviously, but had little patience. She was restless, and annoying. She'd lit up a cigarette without asking Roger's permission. (It was his car. This was his mission, primarily. And he was trying to cut back on his own smoking, which was becoming excessive.) Volpe's aggressive in-your-face style would rub law professors the wrong way, especially in a female. Among the congenial staff of Abercrombie, Cavanagh, Kruller & Hook there was no one remotely like Volpe. Even in Manhattan, among seasoned lawyers, individuals who'd been involved with various liberal organizations like the ACLU, Volpe stood out. She strode through the drafty high-ceilinged rooms of the Project's headquarters on the third, walk-up floor of an old brownstone tenement with the swagger of a jockey, her boy-buttocks cupped in snug trousers of some odd fabric that rustled and whispered My Middle Age: A Romance

ass. My ass. Hey, see? My ass. Roger had heard rumors of Volpe's "intense, polymorphous sexuality" and even a rumor, he'd since discounted, that Volpe had had a baby, and given it up for adoption to a wealthy couple. He disliked her on principle. Though she was a very capable assistant so far.

They were too much alike temperamentally, to get along for a protracted period. Roger knew! He knew the type. Volpe claimed to be from the Midwest but her accent sounded like Brooklyn to him. She spoke rapidly and impatiently and gave the impression of believeing herself superior to anyone around her, which pissed Roger ( he was the superior party, usually) but also intrigued him. Roger had had occasion to overhear Volpe speaking on a phone, in a voice heavy with sarcasm, to individuals (like Elroy Jackson's ex-attorney) who should have been treated with professional courtesy, if only in the interests of manipulating them. (A first-rate lawyer is a first-rate manipulator, or he's nothing.) Since joining the Project staff, coming into the office two or three times a week in the late afternoon and early evening, Roger had been fascinated to hear this spiky female chew out assistant district attorneys and defense lawyers and even clients, social workers, law professors. He'd overheard her speak in rapidfire Spanish.

She'd been critical of one of the Project interns, a slow-moving cow-eyed Barnard girl whom other staff members treated with strained patience.

On this drive Volpe managed to boast to Roger that she'd lived and worked in places as disparate as Arizona, Florida, Alaska, and Vancouver, British Columbia, as well as Texas, and Capetown, South Africa, where for a year she'd taught remedial English to black African adults-"The most exhausting and rewarding year of my life." (So why had she left Capetown, Roger inquired, and Volpe admitted she'd had to leave, she'd been mugged and "pretty badly beaten though at least not raped" by some drug-crazed black youths and couldn't take the pressure of continuing with her work.) She'd been a social worker's assistant in the Bronx. She'd been a paralegal in a Legal Aid office, also in the Bronx. She'd "repudiated" her Caucasian middle-class Indiana background by the age of sixteen. She was furious at what the "system" had done to Elroy Jackson, Jr., among others whom the National Project to Free the Innocent had taken up and she sincerely believed that there was in the United States an "unspoken but calculated apartheid" and that the emergence of selected African-Americans in sports, show business, the arts, and even the law was but a part of the conspiracy. "See, Elroy Jackson, Jr., is the basic unit.

Not 'Justice' Clarence Thomas. The 'exceptions to the rule' are like brand

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names, logos, the ruling class can point proudly to. 'These minority folks have done O.K. in our capitalist-consumer culture, why not the rest of them?' Like female 'leaders' they can point to pretending this is an egali-tarian society and not a sick-masochistic society in which women and girls are raped, battered, and murdered twenty-four hours a day." Roger, driving, staring at the rushing pavement before him, had a vision of a mam-moth Wal-Mart store open twenty-four hours a day for such violent purposes.

Roger was certain he hadn't laughed, or indicated any sign of dissen-sion, yet Volpe snapped, "If you'd been born with a cunt, Mr. C., you'd know."

"With a-what?"

"You heard me. A cunt."

Roger winced. He resented it that, if he used a word like "cunt" he'd be vulnerable to a sex harassment suit, while fierce little Naomi Volpe with her ferret-eyes, spiked hair, and nose ring could shoot off her mouth as she wished.

Seeing Roger's expression Naomi said, with mock deference, "Hey, sorry, Mr. C. I should've said, if you'd been born female, and not white privileged male, you'd know."

"Know what, Volpe?"

Roger was losing the thread of their conversation. Talking with the paralegal was like playing Ping-Pong while driving a car: dangerous. Volpe said, "What it is to be mute and marginal. To be in sexual thrall."

"Somehow, Volpe, you don't strike me as 'mute.' And you don't strike me as a woman in sexual thrall to anyone or anything."

"Is that an accusation, Mr. C., or a threat? Or a come-on?"

But she was smiling.

R than to become involved even casually with any woman with whom he worked. And yet.

In a rat's nest of a law office in Somerville, New Jersey, Roger and his assistant Volpe met Elroy Jackson's court-appointed attorney for his *8 trial: Reginald "Boomer" Spires, an obese, doughy-oily, uneasily smiling individual of moderate height who must have weighed three hundred boneless pounds. "H'lo, come in. Wel-come. Not what you're accustomed Middle Age: A Romance *

to, I guess? Sor-ry." Roger, glancing about the cramped, cluttered office, was appalled. Even Volpe with her deadpan expression and jockey-swagger seemed taken by surprise. "Boomer" Spires thrust out his hand to be shaken, moist and clammy and the size of a catcher's mitt, and Roger had to resist the impulse to shrink away, for could a handshake be infectious? With the air of one making an elaborate joke Spires apologized to his visitors for the fact that there was practically nowhere to sit in his office, unless you shifted stacks of documents off chairs, which he hadn't gotten around to doing, and which he was reluctant to do since the floor was in use, too-"See, I share this space with another p.d. whose specialty is clients with psychiatric disturbances. There's a good time."

Spires laughed wheezily. Neither Roger nor Naomi Volpe joined him.

"Excuse me, folks, my knees are bad, have to sit down," Spires said, collapsing back into his swivel chair, "-hope I'm not being rude." Roger perceived that Spires didn't at all mind being rude but he, Roger, said civilly, "Of course not, Mr. Spires. 'Boomer.' We won't take up much of your valuable time."

Spires had promised to assemble for them material from his files on Elroy Jackson, Jr., but he had only a few court documents, material already in Roger's possession. It was impossible to gauge if Spires was genuinely concerned with Jackson's fate, or whether, for the purposes of this awkward meeting, he was pretending. As they talked of the case, Roger tried not to stare at Spires; but he'd never seen so repugnant a specimen of humanity, let alone a fellow lawyer, close up. Spires's body seemed to consist of layers of fat, oozing oily-fat. Slabs of fat at the back of his head, a puffy round ball of a face, sausage-fingers. Roger could not have said what offended him the more, that Spires was nominally male, as Roger was male, or that Spires was a lawyer, a member of the professional class to which Roger belonged, dubious in Naomi Volpe's scornful eyes as in Robin's.

What's to be proud of ? On a wall, just visible behind a stack of papers, was a diploma from Rutgers Law School. Roger would have liked to ask this character what the hell had gone wrong in his life, how did a man who'd earned a law degree from a good, solid, second-rank school like Rutgers wind up in this sinkhole of an office, wheezing and exuding the stink of failure, bloated as a drowned corpse? Roger shuddered. It could happen to you, pal. Never too late.

He'd committed an illegal act, after all. He'd forged a dead man's signature. He'd entered into a conspiracy with another party to perpetrate a

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fraud (no matter it was a beneficent fraud) upon the state. Grounds for disbarment. You knew the risk.

"Boomer" Spires was doing his best, which wasn't very inspired, to convince the skeptical visitors from the National Project to Free the Innocent that yes, he'd worked damned hard to defend Elroy Jackson, Jr., but no, truth was he hadn't much time to prepare, his client had been wounded by police fire, hadn't been "one hundred percent mentally" and had looked "pretty God-damned guilty" in the eyes of the mostly white jurors, see, it was one of those trials where you didn't have a chance. "Hello, folks, this is Hunterdon County? 'Guilty till proven innocent.' Things you folks in New York City pass off like misdemeanors, a little jail time and parole, over here in Jersey we go for the jugular. See, the death penalty here is popular as TV wrestling." Spires spoke with explosive mirth, shaking his fatty jowls. His eyes shifted furtively in their sockets, like melting Jell-O. The lawyer was crafty enough to know that Roger and his assistant weren't in Somerville for friendly chitchat and he was beginning to get defensive. Roger estimated that Spires was in his late forties-Roger's own age!-yet retained a puckish juvenile air, a fat boy hoping to be spared the ignominy of competing with adult men. His hair was scattered follicles in a white scalp. He smelled not only of nervous sweat but of those cardboard boxes in which pizza is delivered. Roger was particularly disgusted that Spires was wearing a faded Grateful Dead T-shirt and polyester trousers that ballooned around his hips. As if Elroy Jackson, Jr., incarcerated on death row at the Rahway State Maximum Facility for Men, scheduled to be executed by lethal injection in seven months, didn't merit at least a display of sobriety. Roger, examining the transcript of Jackson's trial, began to question Spires more aggressively. "Why didn't you insist that this 'co-defendant' take the stand? So you could cross-examine him?

The man was lying, obviously. He'd cooked up a deal with the DA. Why didn't you object?"

Spires, shifting in his swivel chair, protested, "It was, what, a long time ago, in my lifetime, I'm a busy, busy man, and Jackson was one of an awful lot of 'disadvantaged' clients, you might call them. Like, blacks and Hispanics? Which there aren't that many of population-wise in this county, you'd think, but of the ones there are, mostly in Somerville, it's Boomer Spires who has the good luck to represent them, see? That's been more or less my career, Mr. Cavanagh. Just to explain our different perspectives, see?" Roger said coldly, "I've been going through this transcript and court Middle Age: A Romance

records and frankly, 'Boomer,' I'm appalled. Back in *8 you didn't put much effort into this case, did you? A capital case! You had plenty of cause for objections and you didn't object once. Here's this alleged co-defendant with a record of armed robbery, prison time, and your client Jackson with just petty stuff, and the original police report says there was no 'physical evidence' linking Jackson to the shooting, he'd gotten into trouble running from a crime scene when police called for him to halt, and he winds up shot, and charged with felony murder, and convicted and sentenced to death. What the hell were you thinking of?" Spires mumbled sullenly, "Ask me! How many hundreds of cases like this you think I've taken on, I don't mean death penalty but clients like this Leroy, Elroy, since the early eighties when I moved to Somerville? You think I want to be in Somerville?

See, folks, you have the advantage of hindsight. 'Hindsight ain't foresight.'

See, you walk in here and think you can insult me-" Spires was working himself up, trying for moral indignation. The swivel chair creaked alarmingly beneath his bulk and his Jell-O eyes glared. "See, I'm not a partner at Abercrombie & Fucking Fitch. I don't make five hundred bucks an hour.

What d'you think the hallowed State of New Jersey pays guys like me? I'm lucky if I get five hundred a week." Naomi Volpe, who'd been listening in silence, taking notes, suddenly turned fierce in Roger's defense. "Back off, you! Mr. Cavanagh is volunteering his time on this case you fucked up.

His fee is zero bucks per hour."

By degrees Spires caved in. You could see he was a man who enjoyed caving in, at his own pace. A man throwing himself on the mercy of the court. O.K., he admitted he hadn't spent much time on the Jackson case because he hadn't had much time, the State of New Jersey Public Defender's office worked him and his colleagues like beasts of burden and if they didn't like it, they could always quit. "Plus I'd gotten into the mind-set, I'm reluctant to admit it, but why not be frank, maybe you can sympathize, see, when I'd more or less started to assume my clients were guilty?

Because mostly they are? Somebody's got to be committing the crimes out there, holding up -Elevens and gas stations for chump change, dealing drugs on the streets, right?-so who's it likely to be except guys like Jackson? I don't mean one hundred percent, for sure the Jersey cops are racists to the extent, like all cops, they can get away with it, there's a willing pop-ulace supporting them, see, this 'racial profiling' is just the tip of the ice-berg. Well, I know that. That I know. You're looking at me like you don't approve but you'd have to be blind and your head in the sand not to know

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that. So there's guilty clients, plenty of them, and psychotic. Did I say psychotic? Does a fish swim? Yes? A psychotic is a helpless individual but not an individual you much want to help, see. It's human nature. Not like the clients you deal with, Mr. Cavanagh. Over in Salthill, New York. Jackson might've been one of these, the cops shot him and possibly beat him and extracted a confession, you know how cops are, and this is Hunterdon County not Manhattan, see? His mental processes were interfered with.

And now you're coming in, twelve years after the fact. 'Hindsight ain't foresight.' I had your hindsight, if it was foresight, I'd be a lottery winner.

Sure as hell I wouldn't be here. O.K., Mr. Cavanagh, there's things I didn't see at the time, you want to hang me? O.K., Jackson got a lousy deal.

Think he's the only one? Like getting hit by lightning, these guys on death row. Jackson's just one. You wouldn't know about that, would you, Mr. Cavanagh, getting hit by lightning?" Spires spoke in a childish whine. Roger could see that through his adult life "Boomer" had escaped punishment by pleading incompetence. He'd made a racket out of humility. His honesty was such, you wanted to punch him in the gut for not having the decency to fabricate. Roger was saying, "As a result of your incompetence, Mr.

Spires, an innocent man has been locked away on death row for twelve years. He's had a stay of execution a half-dozen times. Sure, the prosecution withheld exculpatory evidence and the judge was prejudiced but that's them, and you're you, you were being paid to represent Elroy Jackson, Jr., in a capital case, an innocent man, and you did a fucking lousy job of it.

You should be disbarred."

"Disbarred!" Spires was both scornful and alarmed. His lurid T-shirt had darkened with sweat beneath the armpits and across the swell of his belly. Behind his head, a grimy window overlooking Somerville's Main Street seemed to glower with derision. "Hey, look, friend, I do my best.

Maybe it ain't great by your big-city standards but it's Boomer's best, see? They dump these shit cases on my lap, it's like paddling a canoe up the river with just bare hands, what can I do, easy for you to judge! If you-" Roger cut into this self-pitying bilge, saying, "One of the complaints the Project has filed says you 'nodded off ' in court. This was Jackson's complaint and it was corroborated by others. I see in the transcript where the judge says, 'Wake up, Mr. Spires. You're not home watching TV.' " Spires protested, "I never fell asleep in court! I do not.

Maybe I rest my eyes, I have headaches, I need to rest my eyes, that's a crime? That's moral turpitude? You try it. In my shoes. In that courtroom. You'd 'nod off,' too. The both of you. Looking at me like I'm dog Middle Age: A Romance

shit. I wasn't asleep per se and whoever says I was, judge or whoever, that's fucking slander."

"Your closing argument reads as if you were asleep when you gave it,"

Roger said. "It's rambling and repetitive. You never touch upon the central point: that Jackson was an innocent man, and his 'co-defendant' lied, implicating him and getting himself off with a lesser charge. You didn't examine prosecution witnesses. You didn't call any witnesses of your own.

You let all these things slide by. What did you do to earn your fee?"

Spires said, "It's easy for you, sure, to criticize another lawyer, after the fact, O.K. where were you in *8? When this guy needed a hot-shit defense? Why didn't you volunteer your precious time then, Mr. Cavanagh?

And the appeals, what about the appeals, where were you then?"

Naomi Volpe cut in sharply, "You! You fat asshole. If I were you, I'd cut my throat. I'd give up practicing law and save clients like Elroy Jackson the death penalty."

It was then that Spires tried to heave himself up from his chair, or made a sudden defensive gesture as if imagining, or pretending to imagine, that Volpe was going to hit him; and Volpe mistook the gesture, or pretended to mistake it, as offensive, and struck out at him with astonishing quickness, using the edges of both hands simultaneously. This must have been a martial arts move, though one not known to Roger. He saw Spires catch Volpe's fast-flying blows on both sides of his fatty neck, saw the look of astonishment and pain on Spires's face and heard him whimper, like air rapidly escaping from a balloon. Spires spilled sideways out of his chair grabbing at the edge of a desk and pulling over with him to the floor a cascade of documents, plastic cups and containers. On the floor, Spires sat like an upright baby whale, red-faced and panting. "Go away.

Just go away, " he whispered.

Volpe would have replied, but Roger prudently touched the young woman's shoulder and drew her away. Without another word they left Spires's office. "No need to assault the poor bastard," Roger said, laughing.

"Let him sue," Volpe said furiously, "I'm not ashamed of hitting him. He's the one who deserves lethal injection, not Jackson." Roger said, as you might placate a vicious dog, "Don't worry, Volpe. I'm the sole witness to the assault, and I'm yours."

A with "Boomer" Spires, Naomi Volpe was hot-skinned as if sunburnt. Too restless to sit quietly in Roger's car. Could they

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stop for a drink? "Sure," Roger said. "I could use a drink, too." The rat's nest, repugnant to enter, would become an adventure to recount. A shared adventure. Cavanagh and Volpe were now incensed comrades. Cruelly they laughed at the defeated enemy. "Fuck that asshole," Naomi Volpe said loudly, not caring that others might overhear, "can you believe that asshole! And the size of him. Call himself a man if that's what he calls himself, I wanted to laugh in his face. That size, a guy's got a prick this size."

Volpe raised the smallest finger of her right hand. "Ask me, I know." The furrows in Volpe's forehead deepened. Her ferret-eyes glittered meanly.

The smudged, triangular face seemed to Roger attractive, in the half-light of a barroom somewhere in Jersey. Roger liked it that the paralegal could get so worked up in a common cause. After a few beers and a cigarette or two he thought it touching, a sign of Volpe's loyalty, that she should be on his side, when no one was on his side, her fury directed at someone beside himself. He'd signed on as a volunteer for the Project to make his daughter respect him and if Robin didn't come to respect him at least he'd given her grounds for respect and maybe he could respect himself. The Project had been one of Adam Berendt's causes. It was a damned good cause. If Naomi Volpe was associated with the Project, she was a woman to respect.

When they left the tavern it was dark, and dark felt good. You could get too much of daylight. You could get too much of sobriety. They'd lost track of time, but who cared. It was too late to return to East *th Street for sure. As Roger drove, looking for a way back to the interstate, Naomi Volpe continued to speak hotly, passionately. She was leaning forward in her seat, the safety belt unbuckled. At a traffic light Roger noticed her picking at her face; in the bar, she'd been picking at her face; it was a nervous, angry gesture, a mannerism of Robin's, prodding blemishes in her skin and picking with her fingernails until sometimes she drew blood.

Roger reached out to catch hold of Volpe's hand and pulled it away from her face. "Hey. Don't." It was the first time he'd touched her so intimately.

Volpe stared at Roger, and smiled. She drew her hand out of his. They were both aroused, breathing quickly. Roger touched her face, and her spiky hair. Naomi leaned forward to kiss him, a hard quick kiss like a bite.

Did Roger imagine it, or did the barbaric little nose ring brush against his skin? Desire flooded him like molten wax. He hadn't been with a woman sexually in memory. He fumbled to grip Volpe's narrow, hard-muscled shoulders like a man grabbing to save himself from drowning. He kissed her in return, with feeling. They laughed, breathless. "Why're you angry Middle Age: A Romance

with me, Naomi? I'm on your side," Roger said. Volpe grabbed at Roger's hair with both fists. "Nobody's on my side, Mr. C."

Roger drove into a dead-end street of warehouses, a trainyard. He had no idea where he was. Already Naomi Volpe was tugging at his sport coat, at his white cotton shirt, crushing the material in her fingers as if wanting to tear it.