But Halleck had never felt saner in his life.
The outer door of the men's room banged open.
Halleck retreated quickly into the stall and latched it, frightened.
'Billy?' John Parker, his assistant.
'In here.'
'Boynton's coming back soon. You okay?'
'Fine,' he said. His eyes were shut.
'Do you have gas? Is it your stomach?'
Yeah, it's my stomach, all right.
'I just got to mail a package. I'll be out in a minute or so.'
'Okay.'
Parker left. Halleck's mind fixed on his belt. He couldn't go back into Judge Boynton's court holding up his pants through the pockets of his suit coat. What the hell was he going to do?
He suddenly remembered his Swiss army knife - good old army knife, which he had always taken out of his pocket before weighing himself. Back in the old days, before the Gypsies had come to Fairview.
No one asked you ass**les to come - why couldn't you have gone to Westport or Stratford instead?
He took the knife out and quickly cored a seventh hole in the belt. It was ragged and unlovely, but it worked. Halleck buckled the belt, put on his coat, and exited the stall. For the first time he was aware of just how much his pants were swishing around his legs - his thin legs. Have other people been seeing it? he thought with fresh and stinging embarrassment. Seeing how poorly my clothes fit? Seeing and pretending not to? Talking. . .
He splashed water on his face and left the men's room.
As he came back into the courtroom, Boynton was just entering in a swish of black robes. He looked forbiddingly at Billy, who made a wan gesture of apology. Boynton's face remained fixed; apology definitely not accepted. The droning began again. Somehow, Billy got through the day.
He stood on the scales that night after Heidi and Linda were both asleep, looking down, not believing. He looked for a long, long time.
195.
Chapter Nine
The next day he went out and bought clothes; he bought them feverishly, as if new clothes, clothes that fit him well, would solve everything. He bought a new, smaller Niques belt as well. He became aware that people had stopped complimenting him on his weight loss; when had that started? He didn't know.
He put on the new clothes. He went to work and came home. He drank too much, ate second helpings that he ,didn't want and which sat heavily in his stomach. A week passed, and the new clothes did not look trim and neat anymore; they had begun to bag.
He approached the bathroom scales, his heart thudding so heavily that it made his eyes throb and his head ache. He would discover later that he had bitten his lower lip hard enough to make it bleed. The image of the scale had taken on childish overtones of terror in his mind - the scale had become the goblin of his life. He stood before it for perhaps as long as three minutes, biting down hard on his lower lip, unaware of either the pain or the salty taste of blood in his mouth. It was evening. Downstairs, Linda was watching Three's Company on TV, and Heidi was running the weekly household accounts on the Commodore in Halleck's study.
With a kind of lunge, he got onto the scale.
188.
He felt his stomach roll over in a single giddy tumble, and for one desperate moment it seemed impossible that he would not vomit. He struggled grimly to keep his supper down - he needed that nourishment, those warm healthy calories.
At last the nausea passed. He looked down at the calibrated dial, dully remembering what Heidi had said It doesn't weigh heavy, it weighs light. He remembered Michael Houston saying that at 217 he was still thirty pounds over his optimum weight. Not now, Mikey, he thought tiredly. Now I'm ... I'm thinner.
He got off the scales, aware that he now felt a certain measure of relief - the relief a Death Row prisoner might feel, seeing the warden and the priest appear at two minutes of twelve, knowing that the end had come and there was going to be no call from the governor. There were certain formalities to be gone through, of course, yes, but that was all. It was real. If he talked about it to people, they would think he was either joking or crazy - no one believed in Gypsy curses anymore, or maybe never had - they were definitely declasse in a world that had watched hundreds of marines come home from Lebanon in coffins, in a world that had watched five IRA prisoners starve themselves to death, among other dubious wonders - but it was true, all the same. He had killed the wife of the old Gypsy with the rotting nose, and his sometime golf partner, good old tit-grabbing Judge Cary Rossington, had let him off without even so much as a tap on the wrist, and so the old Gypsy had decided to impose his own sort of justice on one fat Fairview lawyer whose wife had picked the wrong day to give him his first and only handjob in a moving car. The sort of justice a man like his sometime friend Ginelli might appreciate.