Lily White (59 page)

“Just a few weeks more.”

“You’re lying!” Lee blared.

“Lee,
please
,” her mother begged. “We love you. We’re so sorry you have to go through all this terrible—”

Lee flipped her hand in her mother’s direction: You’re dismissed. “How long have you known about Robin and Jazz? Don’t think you can lie to me. I ferret out the truth for a living. I’ll get it from you no matter how long it takes and how loud I have to yell.”

“Don’t threaten me, Lee,” Leonard said, setting his jaw firm.

“What do you want to be accused of first? Embezzlement? Insurance fraud? No, that’s boring. Why don’t we jump right into a really interesting sex offense?”

“Let’s stop the theatrics. They won’t get you anywhere.” He
glanced toward the house and the unseen Gibbons. “I found out soon after it started.”

“Which was …”

“When you were pregnant. The accountant was troubled by some charges Jazz had made to the business. So was I. I went and talked to him.”

“And he said: ‘It’s okay, Dad. I was just fucking—’”

“Don’t use that word!” Sylvia called out.

“‘I was just having illicit sexual congress with your younger daughter while your older one was pregnant with your grandchild. Don’t worry about the charges. It’s all in the family.’”

“Do you think I was happy about it?”

“What did you do about it?”

“What do you think? I spoke to him. I spoke to Robin, heart to heart. I told her: It isn’t right.”

“Did you at any point threaten to throw him out of the business if he couldn’t keep his pecker in his pocket?”

“Lee!” Sylvia called, getting up from her chair.

“Do you honestly think my threatening him like that would have stopped it?” Leonard inquired.

“Yes. If you had threatened to fire him. Or to kick that slut out of the house so she would have to earn her own living. Yes, indeed. But you couldn’t, could you?” Leonard looked past her, as if waiting for a ship to come in. “Because you’re afraid of Robin. But that’s not the prime reason. It’s not fear. It’s love. You love Jazz more than any of us, more than all of us put together. If you had a third daughter and Jazz wanted her, you would condone that too. You would choose him over her. Protect him over her.”

“You have your crazy theory,” Leonard said quietly. “Nothing I say can stop you.”

“That’s right. So give your boy a message. He’s not getting custody.” She turned to her mother. “Call me a cab.”

Sylvia looked to Leonard. “Go ahead,” he told her.

“I don’t know who to call,” she replied.

“Tell Gibbons,” Leonard said harshly. “He’ll do it.” She hurried into the house.

“‘Tell Gibbons,”’ Lee repeated, an unexpected smile forcing itself onto her face.

She hurried down to the lawn to pick up Val. “Shwim?” asked the little girl.

“Soon,” Lee said, brushing off the grass from her pajamas.

“Shwim
please?
”

Lee looked down at Val, all thirty-seven inches of her poised to leap into her grandparents’ pool and splash. Right on the spot, Lee determined she would not be on the next plane to New York. What was she rushing back to? All she had left was right there beside her. Chuckie could cover for her at the office. She could call the matrimonial lawyer at Will’s firm and set him to work. And she could find a hotel with a pool—and allow herself and her daughter a day or two to shwim.

Joe Clark, Lee’s divorce lawyer, was a tall, trim, broad-shouldered man in his forties, with a blond crewcut. He and Will, side by side in De Ruyter, Lefkowitz and Stewart’s oak conference room, looked like photographic negatives of each other.

“Can he get custody?” Lee asked. Looking tanned and healthy, she felt embarrassed. She should be wan, frail, maybe trembling a little. That’s how she felt. She had kept Val in Florida for a week, and every night after the child went to sleep in the middle of their king-size bed in the Miami Beach hotel room, Lee would stand over her and weep in silence, terrified that Jazz would win custody.

She finally forced herself back to New York, but there was no comfort there. Jazz’s attorney was not what she had imagined—a sleek, shiny counselor to upper-class Manhattan husbands. No,
much worse: Jazz had chosen Manny Plotkin, a short, bald, sputtering Long Island lawyer, a human torpedo who was fast making a reputation for himself demanding—and often winning—rights for men in child custody suits.

“Realistically?” Joe said. “It’s the exception rather than the rule for fathers to get custody. Especially where the child is a little girl. It’s just not done.”

“They’re going to say I’m an unfit mother.”

“That’s nuts!” Will said.

“You’ve got him on adultery charges,” added Joe. “With your sister. Who’s unfit?”

She could tell they were losing patience with her. “Look, I’ve read some of the case law,” she explained. “There’s a trend. Mothers don’t automatically get custody anymore. And it’s not as if he’s bringing in some New York slicko to represent him. Everyone says this Manny has won a lot of cases out here and …” Fear overcame her, and she could not speak. She pictured all the nights she had worked late, how often Jazz had given the nanny, Cherry, the night off. He had said: I don’t mind being home. I love puttering around the house, making dinner. Robin had been there every one of those nights. She fit in so well, as if she was one of the family. Which she was, someone whose presence Val would never question. The judge would bring Val into chambers, and Jazz and Robin would be sitting there, and before the judge could ask the little girl how she felt, she’d be racing over to climb onto Robin’s lap.

And what could she offer? Jazz had taken Cherry away. Hired her to work for him and Robin. At first, Lee, although furious, was amused at his chutzpah, but then she realized how confident he was that he would win. Did he know something about the judge that she and Joe Clark and Will did not? Jazz was pushing this case with demented energy. He wanted it over. He wanted to win. Every day brought a new shower of paper from Manny’s
office, details—dates, times—of nights worked, meals missed, dinners Lee had had with Will.

“Do you think he had a detective following me the times I met Will for dinner?” she asked Joe quietly. Her hands were like ice.

“Sounds like it.” With his close-cropped hair, rasping voice, and jutting jaw, he appeared to be the ex-marine he actually was.

“But that works for our side,” Will added. “Nothing happened. I’ve been involved with Maria for years. He knows you and I are just friends.”

They both looked at Joe. “In that case, nothing to worry about,” Joe told them. “What can any picture show? A man eating a bowl of spaghetti talking to a woman eating a meatball?”

“How about a black man and a white woman standing in front of the woman’s car talking?” Lee answered.

“You
are
nuts,” Joe told her, nodding apologetically to Will for having doubted him.

“Not totally nuts,” Will responded after a moment. “What she’s getting at is that it depends on what the judge feels in his gut when he’s faced with an interracial relationship. Legally it’s meaningless. Practically, if his gut goes into a knot at the sight of a white woman with a black man, it won’t help.” He rested his elbows on the conference table and gazed across at Lee. “But I can’t believe that’s going to be a deciding factor in this case. Look, this has been a nightmare for you. The man you loved betrayed your trust. That’s a terrible thing, but you know what? It happens. Somewhere in the back of your mind, Lee, you know that in marriages, it is sometimes possible for a man to be unfaithful to his wife. It is even possible that he might want to leave her for another woman. So while this is a bad blow, it’s something that you can deal with.”

“I’m so damn tired of being strong,” Lee said.

“I know. What I’m telling you is that nobody’s strong enough for what you have to handle now. It’s one thing for you to acknowledge that, okay, the marital contract might be violated. But there are certain social contracts that are assumed to be honored by everyone. The family: parent and child; brothers and sisters. Your husband can screw you forty ways till Sunday, but don’t worry—there’s always your family. They’ll be there for you. So what I’m saying is that you’ve had the rug pulled out from under you in new and unexpected ways. The fact you’re sitting here, brave enough to be able to talk about what happened—”

“What the hell choice do I have?” Lee cried out. “Don’t you think I’m up every night, sick with fear about Val and sick with thinking how I’d like to kill them? Some nights, I’m running over Robin with my car. Some nights, I’m taking one of those knives they use to cut fur and slashing my father’s …”

“Understandable,” Joe said with such placidity that she realized his practice was as permeated with threats of murder as hers was filled with the actual deeds.

“All that’s keeping me sane is Valerie. And they want to take her away from me.”

“We won’t let them,” Will said.

Lee pushed back her chair and stood. “Can you give me a guarantee?”

Will hesitated, then turned to his partner to speak. “No,” Joe Clark said. “Wish I could, but I never give guarantees. Sorry. Especially not with a lawyer like Manny Plotkin on the other side.”

“You’re fucking crazy, Lee,” Terry Salazar told her.

“I could take her anyplace. Ohio … Iowa …”

“Yeah? And how would you earn a living?”

“I don’t have to be a lawyer.”

She could say to Terry what she could not say to Will. That with the trial date set in the custody suit, she was growing sicker and sicker with fear. Joe Clark’s rational “Highly unlikely” and “Not to worry, I can be as tough as it takes” did not bring her ease. Nor did Will’s continual reassurance and his attempts to help her understand why she was so terribly scared: Was she frightened by the fury blazing up in herself? Racked with guilt about being a working mother—not just a mother who had to work, but a mother who loved her work almost as much as she loved her daughter? Did she feel that somehow, Robin—pretty, clothes-buying, don’t-want-to-work-for-money Robin—deserved Jazz more than she did because Robin was what a real woman should be and Lee was not? Or that she owed Robin something because she was a success and Robin a failure?

She was getting so tired of Will’s constant company and loyalty and thoughtful analysis that she was actually relieved when he went off to be with Maria. Well, not so relieved. Lee told herself she did not expect him to end a years-long love affair now that she was free, that she was perfectly content with his deep and devoted friendship, with his incredible sweetness, now not only to Val, but to Kent also. But in her heart, that was precisely what she had hoped for: Will for herself.

“Listen, you want to be treated like an equal, but you’re talking like a real dumb broad,” Terry told her. “You got your head so high up your ass you can’t see daylight. You run with the kid, he’ll find you. The bastard’s got nothing but resources to squander on guys like me, to say nothing of the cops and the Feebies who would be looking for you if you went on the lam. You know what this Jazz guy’s worth?” He grabbed the papers on his desk, looking for the figures he had gotten, with a hundred-dollar bribe and a great deal of charm, from a secretary in Jazz’s accountant’s office. “The mil he showed you and Uncle Sam and almost two mil more.”

Lee sat on the white couch in Terry’s all-white office, for once blending in. She was pale, almost colorless. When she looked at herself in the mirror that morning in the house she was renting, she felt sure she had faded, that she was already less. Jazz was winning. She might even die. She was so tired she could barely speak. “Then what should I do?”

“Do? You got a good lawyer. You got evidence up the ass. I got you that waiter who quit the Carlyle, who’s willing to testify about him and her. What other detective could have come up with that, especially considering that I’m working for you on such a discount it’s practically nothing? You’ve got his own admission, for Christ’s sake. He’s fucking living with your sister in your house. Jesus, you folded on that like a fucking wimp. All you had to say was ‘Hey, get your cheating ass out of here and—’”

“It didn’t matter. I couldn’t stand the place anymore. He bought it under false pretenses, so right from the start …”

Lee stopped because Terry began playing an imaginary violin. She did not tell him to go to hell, because she knew he was expecting her to. “You know what gets me about you?” Terry demanded. “You’re so tough. I’m not talking about butch. You’re not. You’re okay, if somebody likes ball-busting women. But look at you now: a fucking basket case. And over what? What are you scared of? A Wasp who was born to run the whole goddamn country and he winds up selling fur coats? What kind of a man do you think that is? For Christ’s sake, Lee, you’re a powerhouse. He’s a pussy! What’s with you?”

“What should I do?”

“‘What should I do?”’ he whimpered. His hands dangled from limp wrists. He pretended to cringe. “‘Oh, what should I—’”

Rage propelled her across the office. It was only when Terry grabbed her arm and held it out to the side that she realized her fist was clenched tight and that she had been about to punch him. Not a stop-that-you-bully sock in the shoulder. A hard
punch in the mouth. They stood there, facing each other, arms stretched out, perpendicular and stiff, as if in some travesty of a tango.

“Get rid of the fist and I’ll let you go.”

“Stop it, you jerk.”

“I don’t think so,” Terry said. His voice was soft, velvet. Not the rest of him.

“Come on,” she said lightly, as if this coming together were a mere annoyance, and that she could not feel his heat through his shirt.

He stretched out her arm even farther, bringer her closer to him. Her face pressed against his, damp with excitement at their dance. “Come on,” he said, rocking his hips into hers. “Come on.” He kissed her, not a gentle suitor’s kiss. Inflamed, right away, with teeth and tongue working on her. She pulled her wrist out of his grip only to put her arms around him, to try to see if she could draw him in even closer.

Terry was good. Better than good. No finesse, no technique, no sweet words. Hot and hard and didn’t stop: That was all she wanted.