I arrived in Kindle County about two on Saturday afternoon. As soon as I turned on my phone after the long flight, there was another series of messages from Esma—multiple missed calls, a plaintive e-mail, and two texts. I had refused to answer her again after our last brief conversation, and the silence seemed to be driving her to extremes. The most recent SMS read: Bill—I wanted to say this in person, but you must know that try as I must, I think I’ve fallen in love with you. I simply cannot let go. It is much too late for that. I must see you and try to make this right.
This sounded like dialogue from a 1930s movie, and the subtext seemed to be all about Esma’s ego. Esma was in ‘love’ with me only because I was not in love with her, never mind her own cautions on the subject. Someday, when I finished bringing international justice to the globe, I was going to figure out the connection between self-image and love.
From the airport, I went to the home of close friends, where I was going to spend the night. Sonny Klonsky, now a federal judge, had started in the US Attorney’s Office about the same time I had. She had made a happy second marriage to Michael Wiseman, a nationally syndicated columnist, a delightful wise guy with whom I shared a sense of humor. They hosted a barbecue in my honor Saturday evening, to which they invited several old pals of mine, including Sandy Stern, everyone’s favorite defense lawyer, who was living in the alternate universe of cancer remission, in which, he admitted, he was never quite sure he was really here.
On Sunday, I left the Wisemans at 5 a.m. so I could fish with Will and Pete. The white bass were running in the River Kindle, and down water the boats were anchored so closely you could have walked shore to shore on their prows. But the boys and I had a secret spot where we fished near shore in waders. It was just below an outcropping in a public park that we reached with a minor act of vandalism requiring pruning shears. The late spring morning was bright and warm, and there were plenty of fish, attracted by another family trick, a bit of red yarn above the lure.
I was proud of my sons, who had both become decent, loving, industrious men, although I always recoiled a bit when I noticed failings of their mother’s or mine one or both boys had incorporated—Ellen’s judginess, or my occasional remoteness. One of the sayings I live by about families is that children occupy the space provided. Will had taken on my solid manner and was advancing quickly at the TriCities office of a New York firm, where he did the legal engineering for complex currency swaps on the Kindle County exchanges. At twenty-nine, he’d found one of those comfortable niches in the law that was virtually guaranteed to provide a livelihood forever.
Pete, by contrast, had been the brooding child, the one we worried about more. There were drugs in high school and academic struggles in college. He had emerged from that period with a keen interest in computers and had developed three different apps that had been purchased by bigger companies. Will always seemed a bit affronted by the magnitude of Pete’s success, although he often joked he was relieved to find out he would not be obligated to support his little brother.
With both sons, there had been a rough time when I left their mother. I knew what it was like to be surprised and disappointed by a parent; and I understood that my sons had lost the home they’d always counted on being able to return to. But their absolute conviction that their feelings were the only ones that mattered became infuriating. After a year, I had declared a rule that once in every conversation they had to ask, “How are you, Dad?” whether or not they really cared about my response.
But all that was now past. My move to The Hague and Pete’s imminent marriage had somehow completed cooling all the lava to solid rock. Standing in the shallows, a few feet from shore, we were three independent adults who accepted our mutual connections as indelible.
After fishing, we had lunch while watching the Trappers game in a sports bar, then Will drove me out to Lake Fowler, where he’d already agreed to stay for dinner. Ellen and Howard’s house seemed no less stupendous, a decorator’s showcase with huge two-story windows looking down on the lake. Once Will was headed back to town, Ellen and Howard and I had one more glass of wine in their kitchen while we compared notes about our sons. The articles in the Times had also sparked my hosts’ curiosity about my work at the Court. I tried to say little but didn’t deny what was obvious, that my meeting with Merriwell was related to that investigation.
“Can I meet him?” Ellen asked, hunching down a bit, almost as if she were ducking from her own adolescent impulses. I gallantly assured her that the general would undoubtedly want to acknowledge their hospitality. I had known from the start that Merry was the kind of figure, a flawed genius in many eyes, likely to be fascinating to Ellen.
The end of our marriage could have been described with the same term pathologists these days apply to someone who dies from old age: multisystem failure. But from my perspective the real trouble had begun more than fifteen years before, when Ellen had become the director of special events at Easton. I saw the job as a strange choice for someone who’d just received her MBA, but the position allowed her to hang with Nobelists and the vanguard of world thought leaders, which I discovered was the company Ellen secretly yearned to keep. With friends, she often gushed about the Life of the Mind, which, apparently, was not the life she’d been living with me.
I never pretended to be as flat-out brilliant as my ex. When she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa as an undergraduate, I didn’t even know how to pronounce it. But once she took her university position, Ellen began to exhibit a fierce need to look down on me intellectually. I knew intuitively that I was doing something to provoke this (a point proven beyond doubt when she married Howard, who, while a true engineering wizard, has never found any book ever written more interesting than ESPN). Instead of trying to figure out why I was alienating my wife, I went into private practice, even though I should have known that move would make things worse. With court dates, meetings, depositions, and trials, I was suddenly out of town at least a third of the year. I worked ridiculously long hours, as I had with the government, but Ellen didn’t see the point now, since defending wealthy bad guys was a far less noble cause. The lone advantage of my new job—that I was making gobs of money—was actually demeaning in her eyes. The grim fact was that I bored Ellen, bored her to the point of weariness, and bearing the brunt of my wife’s judgments left me grinding my teeth whenever I walked into the house. I thought I was doing both of us a great favor when I admitted that we’d lost interest in a life together. The secret of the friendship that we’d forged in the last couple of years was that Ellen was now willing to admit, with whatever irony, that this was one instance when I’d been a lot smarter than her.
Ellen was outside, dressed for work, when Merry’s limo turned up their long driveway at 7:00 a.m. She wore a black sheath with pearls, full makeup and high heels, the kind of getup that could double as business attire and something suitable for the cocktail circuit on which she frequently found herself. Ellen remained trim, and she’d always had the tidy blonde looks that get described as ‘perky.’ I’d never thought about it, but my ex was probably more physically attractive than many of the women I’d dated, even those quite a bit younger, although she’d never had—or aspired to—Esma’s sizzle.
“Boom,” Merry said, as he rose from the limo. We shook and he slapped me on the shoulder, offering a welcoming smile. I couldn’t help wondering how our warmth struck my ex. On the driveway, Ellen hovered in a somewhat starstruck posture, with her hands in the air as if she was afraid to touch anything.