In my hotel room, I went soft, looking out the window. There was a billboard for Our Winning Season, Dennis Quaid blotting out the view to the ocean, and for the first two days I took this as a good omen. But by day three, I realized members of the defense were also staying in this hotel, and who was to say it wasn’t their good omen? I started closing the drapes then.
It wasn’t that I wasn’t allowed to leave. I could go anywhere I pleased so long as I didn’t mind missing a call from Mr. Pearl with an update. Once I did try and go for a walk, right around the time when court started, figuring it was unlikely the phone would ring then. But about half a block away, I remembered that The Defendant’s preferred method of showing contempt was through chronic lateness, and I turned around and sprinted back. I was so paranoid of doing anything that may taint my credibility in the eyes of Judge Lambert that I wouldn’t even let Tina bring me coffee in the morning before she left for court. Not even if I leave it outside the door? she asked through the closed door. Please, just go away! I hissed, worried someone from the press might overhear this exchange and write that the eyewitness whose testimony may have been influenced was conversing with the woman who was alleged to have influenced it.
Going soft is different than going out of your mind. In the seven days I spent in that Miami hotel room waiting for Judge Lambert’s ruling, I didn’t lose my grip on reality, but certain convictions began to rot like a bad back molar. It was with the same dull ache of an infected tooth that I began to question things I had previously labeled unquestionable.
That summer, I was externing at a big firm in the mergers and acquisitions department, unable to admit to myself that it wasn’t just that I hated my stink-faced supervisor, who took pleasure in reminding all the externs that we were being paid not for our brilliance but for our availability, that this was the sort of job that didn’t just affect your personal life; it would be your personal life. What I hated, what left me with an empty, almost nihilistic feeling, was the idea of a career spent representing companies and not actual human beings. Most people who went into corporate law, like my father, were drawn to the impersonality of it. The last thing they wanted to do was deal with a client in a crisis, someone going through a divorce, a custody battle, a bankruptcy. When I was growing up, my father always laughed about how god-awful that sounded, and I always vehemently agreed because I needed this, this one thing we had in common. But sitting in that darkened hotel room, forced to consider what it would feel like if the phone rang with the news that Judge Lambert had struck my testimony, all but ensuring the jury would find The Defendant not guilty, I was also forced to consider what that would feel like for Mrs. Andora, for Robbie’s parents, for Jill and Eileen and Sally, to have to see his smug smiling face in the paper, fist raised in triumph. How would I live with myself, should it go down like that? And I knew the answer wasn’t by making sure big wealthy firms remained in compliance with the law so that they could continue to be big and wealthy.
On day four, when I called that snot-voiced supervisor to tell him I was still in Miami, waiting to find out if and when I would testify, he informed me a little too eagerly that I had ventured into unexcused-absences territory. On orientation day, we were warned that we could be terminated for missing more than three days of work.
“There is nothing I can do,” I told this supervisor, whose name I can no longer recall but whose squinty and constipated face I can.
“In real life,” he was saying—hilariously, as though he knew more about the inconveniences of real life than I did—“our client doesn’t care about your circumstances, outstanding as they may be. In real life, you’ve just lost your client.”
The thought was so clear, it was almost as though someone had spoken it into my ear: I don’t give one flying fuck. “It’s possible this could go on awhile,” I said without inflection. It had been exhausting, trying to keep up this pretense that I cared, with everything else going on. My stamina was in rags. “I don’t want to let down the firm any more than I already have. I’ll draft my resignation letter today.”
Stuttering, the supervisor said, “Let’s not be rash here.”
“Thank you so much for bearing with me on this,” I said graciously. “I apologize for any trouble I’ve caused. Take care.”
I hung up quickly, in case Mr. Pearl was trying to reach me.
PAMELA
Miami, 1979
Day 548
On the stand, when Mr. Pearl asked if the man I’d seen at the front door was in the courtroom, I answered, “Yes. He is.”
Then, as I was raising my right arm to identify him for the jurors, I found I was rising to my feet, the compulsion to stand as instinctual as the night in The House when I ran toward him rather than away. We were about the same distance from each other as we were then. Thirteen feet, two inches. Only this time, he gazed back at me, legitimately bored, one elbow on the counsel table and his face supported in a sprawled-open hand. I was one hour into my testimony, and I had another to go, and he would not be the one to question me. The way his team had to manage him, by calling inconsequential witnesses to the stand just so he had someone to question without torpedoing his defense, would later remind me of a toddler given one of those play cell phones because that’s what all the adults have and he is not a baby.
“Relax, now.” The directive came from the most prominent bench. Though he’d ruled to allow my testimony, I despised Judge Lambert with every fiber of my being, the way he addressed me as ma’am and The Defendant as young man, then later as cowboy, compadre, partner. I was twenty-three years old to The Defendant’s thirty-two. I had earned top marks in my first year of law school. I was the young woman, the compadre, closer to his equal than The Defendant, but you never would have known it by the way the judge spoke to him.
I sat back down on my own time, brushing the lap of my dress smooth.
“What were you doing,” Mr. Pearl continued, “right before you came downstairs and saw The Defendant?”
“I was sleeping.”
“How had you spent the night previously?”
“I was working out the volunteering schedule for some of our spring charity events. After that, I finished up some reading for an econ class.”
“Busy evening. And did you see Denise at all?”
“Yes. She stopped by my room because she wanted to borrow one of my coats, and to see if I wanted to attend a party with her.”
“And what did you tell her?”
“I told her I couldn’t because I had too much work to do.”
“How did she react?”
“She was disappointed, and she tried to get me to change my mind.”
“What did she say?”
“She told me that it was our senior spring and that I deserved to have a little fun.” I angled my knees so that I was speaking directly to the jurors. Mr. Pearl had told me to try and seek out the juror who wore cat’s-eye glasses and a silver cross around her neck. She was a nurse and a single mother, a woman likely to be sympathetic to the account of another woman up to her ears with deadlines and responsibilities. “She told me it was just one party, and that I had my whole life to be Pam Perfect.”
“That’s what she called you—Pam Perfect?”
“Yes. It was a nickname she had for me. After the cooking spray commercial. You know the one that promises to help you save money, calories, and time?” The women jurors were smiling among themselves, nodding. “In the end, they always show the dish and it looks delicious and they say it came out PAM Perfect.”
“And why did she call you Pam Perfect?”
Veronica Ramira objected to that. It called for speculation.
“How did you feel about Denise’s nickname for you?”
“I laughed about it with her, but secretly, I was a little embarrassed by it,” I said. “Perfect is not something anyone wants to be.”
“Isn’t it?” Mr. Pearl asked with a furrowed brow.