Against the Wind Read online

  She tosses me the sports section. “Do you want coffee? I brewed some fresh.”

  “Since when are you drinking coffee?” I ask. She’s a health nut from way back.

  “I’m not. I thought you’d like some.”

  “Sure. Thanks.” I flop unceremoniously on the sofa, start leafing through the sports pages, looking for the baseball scores. It’s a nice little domestic scene being played out here, wife (okay, an ex) fixing hubby a fresh cup of coffee, daughter playing next door with her friend, the paper crisp and unwrinkled, the grass in the front yard is green and freshly mowed, the sky is blue with no prospects of rain; something’s weird here, I’ve been picking Claudia up Saturday mornings for eight years now and Patricia’s never offered me a cup of coffee, not once.

  She places a coaster under the cup, sets it on the coffee-table in front of me.

  “We’ve got to talk.” She sits next to me, but not close enough that we might accidentally touch. Hands folded between her knees, hunched slightly forward. Her shoulders are tense; I don’t know what it is, but it won’t be good. Then it hits me: she’s heard the truth behind my fake leave of absence from the firm, she’s worried about Claudia’s child support, the braces. Maybe, I indulge myself, she’s worried about me.

  “Okay,” I say calmly, “shoot.” I take a casual sip; my body language is going to be cool, I’m a master of my emotions.

  “I heard about your leave of absence,” she says.

  I nod.

  “I think it’s terrific. I wish to God I could.”

  I shrug. “I’m not sure it’ll pan out.” I’ve got to be very careful here.

  “If it doesn’t you can always go back ahead of schedule,” she says. “At least you’ve got something worth going back to,” she adds bitterly. “Your own practice.”

  She hates her job. She’s an assistant District Attorney in the appeals division. Technical stuff; she’s never argued in front of a jury. She’s very good, they’d be lost without her: John Robertson, the D.A., her boss (who I drink with occasionally, even though we’re always on opposite sides of a case, him being the District Attorney and me a defense lawyer) tells me so all the time. She’s hated the job for years.

  “I hate my job.”

  “You’re great at it. Everyone says so.”

  “Oh Robertson, that putz,” she exclaims with considerable irritation. “He’d praise an orangutan if it could take dictation and work overtime three days a week.”

  “No, really.” Is that what this is all about? Some stroking? “Everyone knows you run the appeals division. Rodriguez is only a figurehead.”

  “Great,” she rejoins. “That’s why he makes forty-seven-five and I’m stuck on thirty-five.”

  “He’s due for retirement in a couple years,” I mollify her. “You’re a lock.”

  “I don’t want to wait a couple years,” she says. “Will …” she massages her temples with her knuckles, hard enough to redden them, “I am almost forty years old.”

  “You look great.”

  “Thank you”; resentfully. She presses on. “I’m stuck in a dead-end job that I hate, I’m living in a house that I hate but I can’t afford to buy a new one, and …” here she takes a deep breath … “God, this is embarrassing …”

  “What?” I’m alarmed; is she sick, has she caught some terrible disease, maybe something sexual? All these years I thought she stayed in the house because she loved it. It’s what she’s always told me.

  “I haven’t had a man …” again, a long pause. She’s actually blushing, her neck is flushing. “I haven’t been laid in over a year,” she says to the ceiling.

  The impulse is to offer my services, but that would be making light of it, not a clever move. I look at her; she’s a great-looking woman, what’s wrong with the men in this town? She can’t even get an occasional mercy fuck? That’s the problem; she couldn’t do it that way.

  “So the guys in this town are a bunch of blind assholes or gay. So what else is new?”

  “That’s the goddam point,” she says vehemently, turning to me. “That’s the whole goddam point; that and the fact that I’m going nowhere in my work. Zilch, zero, zip.”

  “It’ll work out.” It’s a lame answer, but what else is there? I’m sorry she’s feeling bad, but right now I’ve got my own problems to deal with.

  “That’s why I’m moving.”

  The cup freezes halfway to my lips. I manage to put it back on the coaster without spilling it on the rug.

  “To Seattle.” She’s on her feet, checking her watch, suddenly fascinated with the time. “I’d better call Claudia. I don’t want you to lose any of your week-end with her.”

  “Whoa Nelly.” Now I’m on my feet, which are uncharacteristically shaky; my legs are turning to jelly. “What’re you talking about?”

  “I didn’t know how to tell you.” She pulls off her sweat-band, stretches it into a figure eight. All of a sudden my head is light, I feel a rush of air through the room. I stare at her, my brain frozen.

  “Simple English’ll do.”

  “All right.” She inhales, gathering her forces. She’s very competent; if our history wouldn’t inevitably have gotten in the way I’d have brought her into the firm years ago; she and Andy’d make a great one-two behind-the-scenes punch. If they don’t take me back she can have my place; save them some money on repainting the door, not to mention cards and stationery.

  “For the past year I’ve been sending out my résumé,” she says. “No big deal, everything on the q.t.; I was curious about my market value, I wanted to know if I had one.” She hesitates.

  “And?” I’m dreading where this is going.

  “There are people out there who think I’m kind of special,” she tells me proudly. I swear her breasts rise under her T-shirt.

  “I think you’re kind of special,” I banter, trying out a grin; it feels lame.

  She stares at me strangely. “That’s funny,” she says, “I’ve never felt that. Not professionally.”

  “It never came up.” I don’t like where this is going, I want to get it back on track. “So where does Seattle fit in?”

  “Four firms seemed interested, enough so that they wanted to interview me. Two were back East; I don’t want to go back there. One was in Tucson, the other was Seattle. So … last month I went to Tucson and Seattle.”

  “I thought you went to your parents in Minneapolis last month.” I’d had Claudia for the entire week.

  “I didn’t want anybody to know.”

  “You didn’t want to panic Robertson,” I say. “Or piss him off,” I add more accurately.

  “In case I didn’t get them,” she nods, answering honestly. She breaks into a grin. “They both wanted me.”

  “So how come Seattle?” My mind is racing but it isn’t going anywhere, it’s stuck in sand. All I can think is if she moves my daughter moves, if my daughter moves I don’t see her, every day if I want to, at least two or three times a week. Right now, this very moment, I am suddenly consumed with fear.

  “It’s beautiful,” she says, “I’ve been living in the desert for twenty years, I want to smell the ocean. And it’s filled with eligible men—nice, charming men. I had dates both nights I was there,” she adds, almost gaily.

  “So how come you didn’t get laid?” I ask sourly. I can’t believe I’m hearing this.

  “I’m not a first-date lay,” she says. “You know that.”

  “That was a long time ago.” I remember it vividly.

  “Some things don’t change,” she says, almost primly. She changes the subject. “And the money’s terrific. I’m starting at seventy-two five.”

  I whistle; that’s good money, Seattle’s a major market but it’s not like New York or L.A. Until I caught fire a few years ago I wasn’t doing that well.

  “Have you ever been to Seattle?” she asks. “Of course you have,” she catches herself, “one of the seniors mentioned he knows you, you handled a case together.”
<
br />   “Joby Breckenridge,” I answer hollowly. He’s the only lawyer I know in Seattle. “Breckenridge and Hastings. Heavy-duty firm. They must have forty, fifty lawyers by now.”

  “I’ll be number fifty-four,” she confirms.

  “You’ll get lost.” This can’t be happening.

  “Of course I won’t.” She’s smiling, widely, one could almost say deliriously. “There’s only four people in my section …” here she pauses for the coup de grace … “I’ll be in charge. In two years I’ll be a partner.”

  “So when does the blessed event take place?” My head is ringing. “When does Seattle’s gain become Santa Fe’s loss?”

  “It’s going to take a while,” she says. “I promised Robertson I wouldn’t leave him high and dry. As much as six months, maybe. I could make the move over Christmas vacation. Probably then.”

  “Breckenridge isn’t champing at the bit?” I’m dying inside, how can she do this to me? It’s a conspiracy, it’s got to be, the world has collectively decided to screw me.

  “They’d like me to start tomorrow,” she replies with a touch of acid, annoyed at my sarcasm. “But they understand.”

  “How very white of them.”

  “Don’t piss on it, okay? I’ve got to do this, Will, try to understand.”

  “Does Claudia know?”

  She takes too long to answer.

  “Yes.”

  “What does she think?”

  “She doesn’t like it. That’s to be expected,” she hurries on, “all her friends are here, it’s all she’s ever known. She’ll adjust; ten-year-old kids are resilient as hell, much more than grownups.”

  “What about me? About her and me?” I hear myself whining, fuck it, what she thinks of me right now is irrelevant.

  “I know.”

  I stare at her.

  “Look,” she says, “do you think I want to separate the two of you? This is the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make in my life; but I had to do it. I’m dying here.”

  She’s dying here. That’s bullshit; okay, it’s not perfect, but it’s a life. And there are men, she’s too damn picky. I’m the one who’ll die here. I’ll be one of those divorced daddies you see standing forlornly in airports on Christmases and holidays; not knowing what my child’s life is, not helping make decisions about anything basic: not being with her.

  “I have joint custody,” I say feebly.

  “She’ll be with you whenever she can. I don’t want anything to come between you two.”

  “Then don’t move.”

  She shakes her head impatiently. “It’s done, Will. Don’t guilt-trip me. I don’t deserve it.” She picks up the phone, starts dialing. “I’m calling her. It’s a beautiful day. You don’t want to waste it. Mary?” she says into the phone. “Will’s here. Send Claudia over. No, right now.”

  I walk to the door, open it. Across the street, a door opens at the same time; we’re in congruence, even in something this mundane. My daughter runs across the street, hurls herself against me. I can’t conceive of everyday life without her.

  “Time to rock ’n’ roll,” she informs me. She’s been watching too much MTV. “I’ll get my backpack.”

  She runs into the house. I turn, watching her. Her mother is watching me. I go outside. It hasn’t been my house for a long time.

  WE SPEND THE AFTERNOON fishing, on my friend Lucas’s ranch up in the mountains. Lucas is your prototypical sixties hippie who founded a commune with a bunch of other urban back-to-earthers who wanted to ‘get back to the land.’ (A phrase you never hear anymore.) Unlike many of the other northern New Mexico communes that started at this time and are still alive, these city-folk eventually tired of breaking their backs trying to farm a piece of land Clarence Birdseye couldn’t have made a go of. Lucas hung in—he’s a tenacious S.O.B.—and bit by bit bought up their shares for ten cents on the dollar. He tried working it the better part of a year on his own before he resigned himself to the inevitable and walked into the county Environmental Planning Commission office, where with the aid of his good friend and ally Agnes Rose, the Land Resources chairman who was elected on a no-growth ticket, primarily with the help of Lucas and other rabid environmentalists, he divided up the property into five-acre ranchettes, making sure to keep the best quarter of the two thousand acres for himself. The ranchettes were rocky, barren land with but one saving grace: each had a fantastic view of the valley and Santa Fe. Within eighteen months they’d all been sold (except for one, which Lucas generously deeded over to Agnes), at an average of $60,000 per lot, and Lucas was overnight a thirty-one-year-old man of wealth and leisure. He and Dorothy (“don’t call me an ex-hippie I never was one to begin with”), his sexy, bitchy, funny, social-climbing wife, are among Santa Fe’s major art patrons, each year holding a big bash at their ranch to raise money for the promotion of Santa Fe art.

  I’m Lucas’s lawyer; for that, besides my fees, which are considerable, I get unlimited hunting and fishing privileges. (He’s one client I’m not going to give up easily; knowing him, a man as perverse as I am, he’ll probably tell my erstwhile partners to shove it, and stick with me.) The stream that rushes through the top quarter of his property is teeming with starving cutthroat trout from April until November; among other bait I’ve caught them with is tin foil, gouda cheese with the wrapper still on, and a busted tap off a cowboy boot. Claudia and I’ve been fishing here for years; for her sixth birthday I bought her a beginner’s fishing kit, and to my great surprise and joy she fell into it immediately. Now she has her own professional outfit and can land a lure on a twig that’s moving in a swift downstream current. We fish with barbless hooks, she takes maybe three or four trophies a year: she’s respectful of all living things, a characteristic I find exceptionally appealing.

  “I don’t want to move,” she tells me. We’ve been working around to this for about an hour. She flicks her wrist like a pro, watches her line arc lazily towards the middle of the stream.

  “I don’t either. Want you to.”

  “What can we do?” She reels in slowly; it’s too close to midday, all the fish are hiding out. “Why don’t you make her your partner?” she asks.

  Would that I could; anything to keep Claudia and me from losing each other. Even if things were hunky-dory that would be an iffy proposition; now that door’s closed and locked.

  “That’s not why she wants to go,” I say. I pop a brew, reminding myself that beer isn’t drinking. “She wants a new life with people who don’t know all her moves. Santa Fe can be a pretty small town.”

  “She’s got the middle-aged crazies,” Claudia says with certainty. “She’s talking about getting a boob job.”

  I look at her: she’s growing up way too fast for my taste. She looks back at me, unselfconscious.

  “How do you know about all this?” I ask, uncertain as to whether I really want an answer.

  “She told me,” she answers blithely. “She showed me the booklet she got from the doctor. It’s gross,” she continues, on a roll now, dissecting it. “They cut this little slit in your armpit (here she raises her arm, shows me exactly where the incision goes) right here, you can hardly see it, then they stick this Baggie filled up with sterile salt water I don’t know if they get it from the ocean or what in the hole and they push it up into the boobs …”

  “Okay, okay.” I don’t need to hear any more of this. “I get the picture.”

  “I told her it’s a stupid idea,” Claudia says. “She’ll wind up looking like that old movie star … what’s her name?”

  “Raquel Raley?” I venture.

  “Yeh, her.”

  “What’s so wrong with that?” I’m not particularly a Raquel Raley fan but you have to admit the lady is still built like a teenager’s under-the-sheet fantasy. “I think your mother’s great-looking,” I add; seeing her this morning brought me up short, sweating through her T-shirt like that, it’s a hell of a lot better than what’s been coming my way these days; “… but if
she thinks she needs to help herself out why should you or I say different?”

  “The human body was not meant to be a receptacle for plastic,” she tells me with obvious distaste.

  “Well spoken,” I say. “I’ll have to remember that. May come in handy in a summation someday.”

  She grins; she loves being involved in my work. I tell her what I’m doing, discuss my clients (often hilariously; she shares my superiority complex, but on her it’s always sweet, never bitter), ask her advice.

  I look out over the water.

  “She wants to get married,” I tell Claudia. “She’s lonely, she doesn’t want to grow old alone. It scares her. You think about stuff like that when you get older.” I pause; should I be burdening her with this?

  She takes it in stride. “Mom’s got me,” she says, looking up at me with those clear blue eyes that knock me over every time she stares at me with any intensity at all. She’s still a kid, practically a baby yet. I catch myself, pull it back into reality; no, she isn’t. I want her to be, but like lots of other things I’d like to stop the clock on it’s not going to happen.

  “Someday you’ll be gone. I mean you won’t be living with me and her anymore,” I add hastily.

  “I already don’t,” she informs me.

  We pack up our gear, walk back down the trail to my car. Across the gorge near the U.S. Forest Station, in the clear mountain air seemingly close but actually several miles off as the crow flies, a small crowd’s gathered. We can see flashing lights from police cars.

  “Somebody must’ve gone over the side,” she observes. “Stupid tourists.”

  Four or five times a year someone, usually a native, not a tourist, will misjudge the speed up here and go off one of the curves. It can be a long drop to the bottom.

  We stand and watch for a minute. Even with the pocket binoculars I carry for bird-watching it’s too far away to see anything. I throw our stuff in the trunk. Claudia dangles her bare feet out the window as I drive back into town.