“Truly? No. He seems like a dick. No offense.”
“And do you not honestly think that you are better for me? Honestly?”
“Honestly, yes. I vote for me. But there are roughly three and a half billion other men on the planet and there’s a fair chance that one of them is even better for you than both of us.”
She gave me that tiny impish grin.
“I think my life is complicated enough with two men in it,” she answered. “I must skip the other three billion for the moment.”
We went out to run, but rain started halfway along. Ordinarily, we might have kept going, but we caught each other’s eye and went straight home, where we climbed into the shower together.
“Don’t give me away so easily, Boom,” she said as she clung to me afterward in my bed.
“I’m not giving you away, Nara. But one of the worst moments a person can have is to look up years later and wonder what you did with your life.”
“You say these things as if you have no stake in them. How would you feel if I say, ‘Okay, you are right, I am going to look for someone else, someone who’s certain he wants kids,’ or something like that?”
“I’d feel shattered, frankly. But I’d try to understand. I think I would. And I’d move on. I’d have no choice. Only—”
“Only what?” she said.
“Nothing,” I said. I had no wish to guilt her, which would have been the result. And I was a little surprised at myself anyway. I’d been about to say, ‘Only I’d worry whether I’ll ever feel this way again.’
VIII.
Breaking the Law
33.
Foley Square—July 9
I dropped my suitcase at a boutique hotel in Nolita that I’d chosen off the Internet, then walked through Chinatown to Foley Square and 60 Centre Street, the original home in New York City of the State Supreme Court. I had never set foot in this building, although I’d spent more time than I’d liked at the federal courthouse across the street. There, the zesty fuck-you air of New York had left relations between the prosecutors and defense lawyers so permanently embittered that I might as well have introduced myself to the Assistant US Attorneys I had to deal with as the Snake from the Garden.
Like many other courthouses erected in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, 60 Centre was intended to be a temple of Justice, fronted by an imposing Corinthian colonnade. Within, I found what I regarded as standard New York building stock, which is to say a structure with gorgeous bones—marble footboards, graceful arches, grand beaux arts chandeliers on huge brass chains, delicate stenciling on the plaster, and a brightly restored mural over the rotunda featuring such all-stars of justice as Lincoln and Hammurabi. All those glorious details were overcome by weak light, years of grime, scaling paint, and decades of uncompleted repairs, accounting for the frequent use of duct tape on doorways, vents, and some furnishings.
Part 51, the Matrimonial Division courtroom where the Jahanbani case was being heard, was in the same mood as the rest of the building, two and one half stories tall, with pressed panels of oak wainscoting and a lovely turned railing separating the well of the court from the straight-backed oak pews for spectators, where I took my seat. The beauty of the design appeared to be entirely lost in the rush of the day-to-day. A blue plastic recycling bin sat beside the jury box, while decades of justice had taken their toll on the handsome oak furniture on which the finish was splintered along the edges. This was especially true of the long table in front of the judicial bench at which I recognized Esma, seated beside a young woman whom I took to be one of her junior attorneys. At the other end of the same table, the opposing associate and client were also seated, a practice I hadn’t seen before and which seemed fairly injudicious, given the hot-tempered nature of divorce litigation. Looking at this arrangement, I suddenly understood how Mr. Jahanbani had gotten batted across the head. He looked none the worse for it, dignified and straight backed, a slender handsome elderly man, bald headed, with a vein beating visibly at his temple.
According to my reading, Jahanbani v. Jahanbani now had a procedural history as complex and irregular as the growth pattern of some cancers. In the last few years, the Jahanbanis had been referred out three different times for trial of different issues before hearing officers, called ‘referees’ in this system, but were back before the beleaguered judge for an evidentiary hearing about whether certain assets of Mr. Jahanbani—of which his wife wanted a piece—were within the jurisdiction of an American court.
Listening now, I could hear the principal lawyers for Mr. and Mrs. bickering before the judge about the order of witnesses for the day. At this stage of my life, I had come to accept that I was basically a law nerd who could sit in virtually any courtroom and be drawn in. I was inevitably engaged by the nuances of the lawyers’ performances, and even more by the way the judges, who had heard it all before and, far worse, were going to hear it all again tomorrow, absorbed the speeches and complaints. Probably because the judge’s role was the only one here I hadn’t played, I was always fascinated by the demeanor each brought to the silent duty of listening. Some displayed visible boredom or churlish impatience, some sat expressionless as a zombie, others evinced a trace of whimsy or—the most admirable, because they were doing what I could never manage—avid interest in every word.
Among trial lawyers, there was always a group who dismissed divorce cases as not litigation at all. I never saw it that way, although it was almost always true that the anguish of the parties dominated the proceedings. No matter what the lawyers’ art, you always heard the same agonized lament playing in the space between words like the muffled screech of a violin—‘S/he doesn’t love me anymore.’ That was an injustice for which the law had no soothing response.
The judge, named Kelly, a middle-aged African American woman, had followed the idiosyncratic local practice, sometimes adopted as a bow to democracy, and wore no robe. Seated on the bench in her mauve business suit, Judge Kelly was in charge nonetheless, pleasant but efficient. She ruled without much elaboration in behalf of Esma on the latest dustup. With that, the justice, as judges were called here, announced a recess and exited. All stood, and Esma, chatting with her main lawyer, who’d returned to counsel table, faced my way as they proceeded toward the corridor. I waited just beyond the dark rail.
Catching sight of me, Esma came to a complete halt. Although her eyes never left me, she eventually reached for her lawyer’s elbow to send the woman ahead. After another second, Esma exited through the gap in the rail to approach me.
“Bill,” she said. She seemed somewhat breathless from surprise. She was again dressed down for court: a simple gray dress, less jewelry, her overgrowth of dark hair tamed by a ribbon tied at the back of her head. She looked well and, as always, beautiful. “This is quite a surprise.”
“I need to speak to you,” I answered.
“Bill, I’m sorry I never returned your calls. But I don’t need to explain, do I?”
“Not that,” I said. “Perhaps a few other things.”
She pointed and we went into the dim corridor with its marble-clad walls. All in all, she seemed far more poised than I could have been after being discovered in a lie of this magnitude.
“And how is it that you find me here?” she asked.
“A little scouting around. You’d described this case to me.”
“Ah yes. You can see it’s as I said, bitter and interminable.” She was walking me down the hall, out of earshot of anyone else. “By the way, your last message mentioned Bank Street?”