The Sabbathday River (43 page)

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Authors: Jean Hanff Korelitz

BOOK: The Sabbathday River
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“Sure.”
“So you've been married for”—Judith looked down at her notes—“nearly six years, am I right?”
“Six years next June, right.”
“Happy marriage, I take it?”
“Well, you know.” He was catching on. “Ups and downs. Marriage can be hard.”
Naomi smiled. Ashley Deacon: font of wisdom.
“I see. And how did you deal with the downs in your marriage, Ashley?”
He frowned at her suspiciously. “What do you mean, ‘deal with'?”
“Well, did you, for example, seek the help of a marriage counselor? Did you try to sit down regularly with your wife to work out your problems?”
“I didn't say we had
problems,”
Ashley said defensively. “I said it was ups and downs, like any marriage.”
“Oh, sorry,” Judith said amiably. “What do you think the downs were all about, then?”
“Just the normal stuff,” he said, his voice tight. “Like, oh, I don't know, maybe she wanted to be living closer to her folks, that kind of thing.”
“Really?” Judith seemed surprised. “That was the only topic of disagreement in your marriage?” She waited for him. He said nothing. Judith smirked at the jury. “I'd say you were pretty well off if that's the only thing you had to disagree about.”
“It's a pretty good marriage,” Ashley confirmed.
“Sure.” She nodded. “So tell me, how many affairs have you had since your marriage?”
“How many … ?” he said in disbelief.
“Oh, okay,” Judith said affably. “Let's just limit it to the period since you moved to Goddard. How many affairs in the last five years?”
Charter was looking grim, but he hadn't gotten up, Naomi noted. She smiled.
When Ashley saw he wasn't going to get any help, he scowled at Judith. “Couple, maybe.”
“Maybe a couple?” she said brightly.
“Well, it depends on what's an affair.” He sulked.
“Oh, you're right. We should define our terms. I mean, are we talking about only ongoing affairs? Like, when you have sex with the same person over a period of time? Or are we counting the one-night stands, too?”
He set his jaw. Charter made an objection, his irritation barely contained.
Judge Hayes called both attorneys up to his bench and Naomi watched their dumb argument of hisses and hands. When they turned back, Charter was enraged, Judith smug. She went back to her pose, her amiable perch near Ashley's elbow.
“So, what were we saying? Oh yes, whether or not to count the one-night stands, right?” She looked at him keenly. “You tell me how you want to do this, Ashley.”
It was potent, Naomi thought. Like telling a kid he had to figure out his own punishment for an infraction, and Ashley knuckled under right away, though with the appropriately sour expression.
“I fooled around a little. It wasn't a big deal.”
“You mean, I suppose, that it wasn't a big deal for
you
?”
“Well, it wasn't.”
“And the women with whom you were fooling around?”
“They knew I was married,” he said.
“Hm,” Judith said noncommittally. “And how many women are we talking about here?”
“A few.” His voice was tight.
“More than five?” He was silent. “More than ten?”
“I don't see what this has to do with
her
,” Ashley said fiercely.
“More than twenty, Ashley?”
“
Not
twenty!” His voice was bitter. “Not
twenty.”
“Less than twenty,” Judith went on, even and relentless.
“Of course, less than twenty!” He sounded ridiculous.
“But more than, say, fifteen.” She looked at him archly.
“I didn't say that. I didn't say fifteen. There weren't fifteen!”
“Come on, Ashley.” Judith sighed. “Do I have to bring them in here?”
He glared at her, amazed. Naomi, who knew it was a bluff, could barely believe how still Judith's face was, almost serene in its confidence. The courtroom seemed to exhale collectively, and then Ashley shook his head.
“I honestly don't remember how many exactly,” he said, blinking first. “There were some. Maybe … ten, twelve, or so. But they knew I was married,” he insisted, as if this explained everything.
“And your wife? How did she feel about your sleeping with at least twelve other women since moving to Goddard five years ago?”
“I don't know,” Ashley said unkindly. “You'll have to ask her.”
Judith, wisely, gave the jury a moment to despise him.
“Would you agree that Goddard is a small town?”
Momentarily disarmed at the shift, he looked at her. “Well, sure.”
“Would you agree that when a man moves into a small town with his wife and sleeps with at least twelve women in the space of five years, his neighbors are probably going to become aware of his activities?”
“It's possible, I guess,” he conceded.
“So you're not surprised, Ashley, that your neighbors have been well aware of your many adulteries?”
“If you say so,” he said resentfully.
“Did you discuss your adulterous affairs with your wife, Ashley?”
He gave Judith a bitter look. “I don't really see that that's any of your business.”
Naomi looked instinctively at Charter. He was tense but still. Judge Hayes ordered Ashley to answer.
“Not really,” he told her. Then, magnanimous: “I didn't want to upset her.”
“That was thoughtful of you,” Judith said sweetly. “To your knowledge, did your wife, Sue, find out about any of the twelve or more women you committed adultery with before your affair with Heather Pratt?”
He bristled at “affair,” but said no. “I don't think so, anyway.”
Judith looked perplexed. “You don't think so? You mean you don't know for sure? You never discussed this with your wife, even after the
issues inherent in this trial were brought to light?” She half turned so that the jury could register her amazement, then turned back to Ashley. “She never confronted you with something she might have heard or seen, that made her think you'd been having sex with another woman?”
“No,” he said stiffly.
“So as far as you're aware, Heather was the first of your girlfriends that Sue ever found out about.”
“Yes,” said Ashley.
“And how did you discover that Sue was aware of Heather?”
“Somebody told her,” he said, his voice fierce, as if this person was responsible for everything. “Some
woman.
So when I came home that night, she was all worked up.”
“All worked up,”
Judith mused. “And I take it you were honest in admitting the affair to your wife.”
“She knew all about it, anyway.”
“So there was no point in denying it?”
“Sure,” he said.
“And was it shortly after this that your wife went to the sports center to confront Heather Pratt?”
“Next day, I'm pretty sure. But she was emotional. She was pregnant.”
“Which one of them are you speaking of, Ashley? Who was pregnant?”
A titter from the back of the room. The women on the jury were smiling at their knees. The men, Naomi noted, lagged a step behind and looked merely confused.
“Both pregnant,” Ashley said.
“Your wife and your girlfriend were having a confrontation in the sports center, and both of them were pregnant?”
He nodded tersely, once. “Yes.”
“With your children.”
“Well, I don't know that for a fact,” he said, as if this were a point in his favor.
“You're not quite sure whose baby your wife was carrying?” Judith said, confused.
“I … no.” He was furious. “My wife never fooled around!”
“Are you sure?” Judith sounded innocent. Charter, delighted to have something to object to, shot to his feet. Over the low, ambient laughter, Hayes scolded Judith, but she didn't look particularly wounded.
“What you mean, then,” she tried again, “is that you're not sure the baby
Heather
was carrying was your own.”
“I don't know everything she was up to!” he shouted. “Hell, I only saw her an hour a day or so!” This disclaimer was something of a miscalculation. Charter, incensed, looked brutally at some anonymous point on the floor.
Judith nodded sagely, walked back to her table, and leaned casually back against it. The overture was over, and now the curtain went up. With her client's prostrate upper body only inches behind her on the defense table, but unacknowledged by any physical gesture, Judith began to ask about Heather. She moved swiftly, hitting her marks with a businesslike efficiency. At their first meeting, did Heather actually ask for a lift home, or did Ashley offer? He couldn't remember. How did they end up at the precise place in the woods where they parked and had sex? Well, Ashley knew the place. He had been there, sometimes. (Judith let this go, the suggestion of his other women, his army of afternoon engagements, lingering in the courtroom.) What, specifically, had Heather done to imply that she had been promiscuous in the past?
She'd said so, Ashley said, triumphant. She'd said she wasn't a virgin!
And might this not mean that she had had only a single lover before him?
He pouted, but he did the math. Yes.
“So what she might well have been saying was that, at the age of eighteen, she had had one sexual experience before her experience with you. Is that right?”
He supposed it could be right.
“Do you think a girl who has had one sexual experience by the age of eighteen is promiscuous?”
He considered, then shrugged. “I don't know.”
“How many sexual experiences did you have by the time you were eighteen, Ashley?” Judith sounded genuinely curious. Ashley's outraged
It's different for a guy!
remained miraculously unspoken, but then he couldn't help boasting. “Maybe ten or twelve.”
Another ten or twelve! American versus metric. Naomi grinned openly.
“So there you were in the back of your car, in a place back in the woods that you'd driven to because you knew the place from …” Judith shrugged,
“some other time.
And you're a twenty-six-year-old married
man with … let me just do the math here, hang on a minute”—she screwed up her face to calculate—“uh, ten or twelve sexual partners before you were eighteen, then from eighteen to twenty-one we don't know, then another ten or twelve after you moved to Goddard with your wife, so that's at least twenty, plus your wife, twenty-one, plus Heather, of course, twenty-two, but if we go with the twelve, not the ten, it's … twenty-six? Could that be right?”
She looked at him, as if for an answer.
“If you say so,” Ashley allowed.
“But I'm not saying so,” she said innocently. “This is what you're saying.”
“Then it's true.” He folded his arms, tensing for whatever was next.
“And with you in the back of your car, in this spot in the woods, is eighteen-year-old Heather, whom you're giving a lift home to. And she's had one sexual partner. Maybe one sexual partner one time.”
“Maybe more,” he said harshly.
“But only one time that we can be sure of, I think you're saying.” She waited for confirmation, and grudgingly, Ashley gave it.
“Tell me about the back of your car. Was it comfortable?”
“I put down the back seat, so there'd be room.”
“Was it clean?”
“Clean?” he said, amazed, as if “clean” were a dirty word.
“Yeah, clean. You know, was it a nice place to have sex?”
“I had tools in the back. Ropes and stuff.”
“You had sex on top of the ropes and tools?”
“She could have said no,” he shot back. “I might have put down a towel or something. I know later
she
brought a towel to put down,” Ashley said with some satisfaction, but the jury, Naomi was pleased to note, by now seemed rather less impressed with this fact.
“So you had sex in the back of your car, on top of the tools and ropes, with maybe a towel.” She paused. “How was it?”

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