The Judas Glass Read Free Page B

only meant that Connie was calling the office again, maybe calling Matilda at home, being reassured by that wise woman that she hadn’t heard of any accidents on the Bay Bridge.
    So what was the problem? Why didn’t I tell Connie to call Jessica Friedlander or Ben Sattler—both perfectly good divorce lawyers. Or Stella—Stella would nude-wrestle a crocodile for the right price.
    Rebecca was exotic, a woman who lectured in musical theory, and played the piano well enough to have prizes, framed documents, hidden away in her closet. Even her handicap made her a creature from another world, and she was in every way too much my dream of what a special woman should be. She had been blind since the day after her tenth birthday, a brain lesion caused by a hit-and-run driver. She was beautiful, needful in a way that wasn’t clinging. She said she had never played as well as she had since we became lovers.
    And Connie? I tried to make a list of Connie’s virtues but the phone started in again and I didn’t bother. Besides, I was beginning to feel that flutter as I turned left onto Capistrano Street. I still took my marriage seriously in one part of my mind.

3
    â€œI could fall over something,” I said. A new rug was bunching up behind the door, one of those Zapotec rugs with animal patterns, bears or trunkless elephants.
    She didn’t say anything for a while, let me imagine what she might be about to say, put words in her mouth.
    She spoke. “I’ve been sitting here looking forward to this. Wondering what you’d say.”
    As usual the living room was a new configuration of vague shapes and objects; a cello, it looked like, leaned against a wall, couches moved around, something that looked like an Easter Island profile over by the window.
    She said, “You didn’t answer your phone.”
    I had to watch where I was going. I flung my briefcase onto the sofa, turning on one of the table lamps. The little lamp was pretty, but didn’t make much light. I didn’t have to look to know where she was, red fingernail to her front teeth, tapping her bicuspids the way she always did, with one of her unhappy smiles.
    I turned to look. Yes, there she was. In me Connie had seen status if not big money, life with a Name Lawyer. What, I asked myself, had I seen in Connie?
    â€œI know who you’ve been with,” she said.
    I didn’t like this, Connie referring to a woman she had never met, someone she could never imagine, let alone understand. I kept my temper. It was 12:13 A . M . and I felt fresh. If Connie wanted the truth she could have it. Here it was, the little chat that would blow up my marriage, one of those wobbly buildings too dangerous to leave standing.
    One light wasn’t enough. I steadied a pole lamp as I bumped into it. I struggled with the button until it came on.
    Connie’s laptop was folded shut. A box of paperclips had spilled, glittering metal clamps on the carpet. There were folders in a file at her feet, a white box with black wheels. I was always stumbling over rolling files in the bedroom, the library, white bookshelves of Etruscan matrons and Hopi fetishes.
    â€œYou turned off the light when you heard the car,” I said.
    â€œDid you see the light go out?”
    I didn’t answer, but she saw my eyes flicker to the invoice from Afri-art, two fertility figurines, ebony . She didn’t sit here under blackout conditions writing checks.
    â€œThere’re two kinds of people,” said Connie, pretty in her dressing gown, something expensive, padded shoulders, lavender. She was wearing fresh makeup. “People who sit on the back porch looking in, and people who sit on the front porch, looking out.”
    Connie was making a mistake. If she wanted an honest talk she should stick to issues of truth. If she began to argue she would be playing a game I was good at, even though it was a talent I did not much appreciate. “Meaning