A Fine Line Read online

  The door to Ben’s office on the other side of the book room was open. I sidestepped the table and went in.

  This was a smaller version of the front room—two walls of bookshelves, one wall of file cabinets, a single dirty window that opened onto a fire escape in the back alley, and a big oak desk with a telephone and a computer and piles of papers. Ben was sitting behind the desk peering at a computer monitor. He was sipping from a coffee mug. I doubted it was coffee.

  Ben Frye was a gangly, stooped, heronlike man with a long beak and big sad eyes. He had a half-bald head and a long gray-blond ponytail and a scraggly beard. He wore a hoop in his left ear, an Indian bead necklace around his neck, and a red bandanna around his head. He’d occupied the admissions office at B.U., he’d marched with Dr. King, he’d gotten arrested in Chicago, he’d danced in the rain at Woodstock, and he’d been stoned at a hundred rock concerts all over the nation.

  Later he’d earned his Ph.D. in cultural anthropology at Duke. Typical old hippie.

  I cleared my throat, and he turned, pushed his glasses on top of his head and grinned at me. “Well?” he said. “Where are they? You got those Lewis letters with you, right?”

  I nodded.

  He pointed at my briefcase and snapped his fingers. “Lemme see ’em, man.”

  A straight-backed wooden chair was pushed against the wall. I dragged it to Ben’s desk and sat down with my briefcase on my lap.

  “So how have you been?” I said.

  “Come on, dammit,” he said. “Gimme the letters. I’ve been peeing my pants since Duffy told me about them. Meriwether Lewis to Alexander Wilson? You realize what you got there?”

  “Walt seemed to think they were worth something.”

  “Listen,” he said. “If these letters are . . .” He shrugged. “I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ve got to look at them. Hand ’em over.”

  I opened my briefcase, took out the manila envelope, and held it against my chest. “Could they be forgeries or something?”

  He nodded. “It’s possible, sure. There’s a lot of interest in documents from the Voyage of Discovery nowadays. Ever since that Ambrose book and the PBS series. Ambrose pointed out that there seems to be a lot of missing stuff. Big chunks of time, no journals, for one thing. Some of it’s probably lost forever, but once in a while something turns up. And, yeah, there have been some forgeries.” He reached across the desk. “So I gotta see that stuff.”

  I handed him the envelope.

  He took it, adjusted his glasses onto the bridge of his nose, opened the manila envelope, and slipped the plastic envelope out. He bent close to it. “Oh, my,” he muttered. “Holy shit.” He groped around on his desk, found a magnifying glass, and peered through it. “Long-billed curlew,” he mumbled.

  “Is it genuine?” I said. “The letter?”

  He looked up at me and blinked. “I wish it was that easy,” he said. “I’ll have to test the paper and the ink, study the handwriting, the spelling and syntax, all that. Meriwether Lewis was a poor speller but a knowledgeable naturalist.”

  “Suppose they’re genuine?”

  “Then I do my research and come up with a value for them.”

  “How do you do that?”

  Ben shrugged. “Check the auctions. Talk to the curators. It’s not a science. I gather as much information as I can, then try to estimate what Duffy could sell them for. It’s supply and demand, like anything else. This is a good time for Lewis and Clark stuff, but I might advise Walter to keep them off the market for a couple years. We’re coming up on the two-hundredth anniversary of the beginning of the expedition. They departed in the summer of 1804, you know.”

  I smiled. “Yes, I knew that.”

  “Well, we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves.” He smiled. “I really get off on this stuff. This is better than free love in Harvard Square. Remember the night LBJ announced he wasn’t going to run?”

  I smiled. “I was in seventh grade in sixty-eight, Ben.” I stood up. “I assume you’ll be in touch with Walt?”

  He nodded.

  I reached across his desk. “I’m outta here, then.”

  He gripped my hand quickly, then said, “You can find your way out?”

  I nodded and turned for the door. When I looked back, Ben Frye was hunched over the plastic envelope of letters, peering through his magnifying glass.

  On the way home I stopped at Skeeter’s for a burger, and I ended up watching the ball game on the TV behind the bar, so I didn’t get to my rented sixth-floor condo unit on Lewis Wharf until after eleven. I dropped my briefcase inside the doorway and headed straight for the bedroom.

  The red light on my answering machine was blinking. Two blinks, pause, two blinks. I hit the “play” button, then began to strip off my office pinstripes.

  The recorded voice said, “First message, today, eight-forty-seven P.M.” Then came the voice of Billy, my older son: “Hey, Pop. Whatcha doin’? Just wanted to say Happy Father’s Day. Knowing me, I’ll forget to send a card. Fishing’s been great. When you comin’ out?”

  Billy had dropped out of UMass in the middle of his sophomore year to pursue his dream of becoming a trout-fishing guide and ski instructor in Idaho. Now, at twenty-two, he seemed to have realized his dream. I kept wondering what he’d do next. Most people go through their whole lives without ever fulfilling their dreams.

  Father’s Day. I had no idea it was approaching. Joey, Billy’s younger brother, was a junior at Stanford. Joey would remember to send me a card. He was that kind of boy, just as Billy was the kind who’d forget. I loved them both equally.

  The annoying recording on my answering machine was saying, “Second message, today, ten-thirty-two P.M.,” and then came Evie Banyon’s soft, seductive voice: “Hi, sexy man. Where are you? If you get in before midnight, call me. I need you to tuck me in.”

  I hung my suit in the closet, pulled on a pair of sweatpants, and lay back on my bed. I had known Evie for nearly two years. We had both spent the first year fighting ourselves—and each other—against growing too close. Then she disappeared. I could have let her go. I almost did. But I didn’t. I tracked her down to the other side of the continent where she was holing up in her father’s houseboat in Sausalito. She and I spent two weeks driving back to Massachusetts, more or less retracing the route Lewis and Clark had taken. We listened to local radio stations on the car radio, we made love in motel rooms, we ate in diners.

  We’d been lovers for a year, but after that cross-country road trip, we became friends, too. It was our own voyage of discovery.

  Evie and I were both independent people. We’d had lots of relationships. None had endured. Even my eleven-year marriage to Gloria seemed, in retrospect, transitory. Evie and I figured that in all cases, it was our own fault. We decided that the best way to keep our own relationship going was to enjoy the present and not think too much about the past or the future.

  But we also agreed to keep our options open. One day one of us might want to change the deal. Live together. Get married, even.

  Or call it off.

  We promised each other that if that happened, we would say so—openly, freely, immediately. Neither of us was very good at talking about our feelings. It had made that first year rocky. That was the main insight we got from two weeks together in her Volkswagen Jetta. That and the fact that we did love each other.

  I picked up the phone, and Evie answered on the third ring.

  “It’s me,” I said.

  “Hello, you.”

  “You in bed?”

  “Mmm.”

  “I woke you up,” I said. “Sorry.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Amost eleven-thirty.”

  She sighed.

  “Hard day?”

  “Oh, like usual.” Evie was the assistant administrator at Emerson Hospital in Concord. She was responsible for patient services and public relations, which meant she handled everyone’s complaints and problems. She was very good at her job. �
�I fell asleep in my bubble bath,” she said. “I might have drowned. No strong man to rescue me.”

  “Or to wash your back.”

  “Or any other achy, tingly body part,” she said.

  “You’re a cruel woman,” I said. “I’ll let you get back to sleep. Just wanted to kiss you goodnight.”

  “Mmm,” she murmured. “That’s sweet.”

  “Well . . .”

  “I had an idea,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Tomorrow after work? Let’s have a picnic.”

  “Sure. Sounds good.”

  “Meet me at Walden? I’ll pick up some sandwiches, bottle of wine. You bring the blanket.”

  “I can be there by seven,” I said.

  “I’ll meet you down by Thoreau’s cairn. I’ll be the girl watching the swallows chase fireflies over the water. After it gets dark and the owls start hooting maybe we can make out on your blanket.”

  I smiled at the thought.

  “Brady?” she said after a moment. “You there?”

  “Yes. I’m smiling.”

  “Good. I’m going to sleep now. See you tomorrow.” She hesitated. “Love you.”

  “Me, too,” I said.

  After I hung up, I lay there staring up at the ceiling wondering why Evie always said, “Love you,” and not, “I love you.” There seemed to be a difference.

  Of course, it was I who said, “Me, too.” Not: “I love you, too.”

  Evie and I still had a few things to work out.

  THREE

  I’d already put in six boring hours of lawyer work, and now Herm Alberts, my last appointment of the day, was hemming and hawing, trying to decide whether he wanted me to draw up a prenuptial agreement for him. I was trying to help him understand the pros and cons, and trying not to reveal my personal feelings about the whole distasteful subject, when Julie buzzed me.

  The only time Julie ever interrupted a client conference was if one of my sons was trying to reach me, and my sons virtually never called me at the office. So naturally I assumed something bad had happened.

  I asked Herm to excuse me and picked up the phone. “What’s wrong?” I said.

  “Nothing’s wrong,” said Julie. “It’s Mr. Duffy. Can you talk to him?”

  “Why don’t I call him back?”

  “He’s rather insistent, Brady. It’s probably important.”

  I smiled to myself. What Julie wasn’t saying, but what I knew she meant, was that prenuptial agreements were not only unimportant, but positively distasteful. Any discussion of prenups could and should be preempted. “Okay,” I said. “Put him on.” I covered the receiver with my hand and said to Herm, “This’ll just take a second.”

  He shrugged. “No problem.”

  I uncovered the receiver. “Walt? What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong,” he said. “I need to consult with you.”

  “You okay?”

  “Sure. I’m fine.”

  I glanced at my watch. It was ten after four. I figured I could get rid of Herm by four-thirty or so. “I’ll call you back in three-quarters of an hour.”

  “I’d rather it was face to face, Brady.”

  I sighed. I’d rather it was on the telephone, but Walt was the one paying me the retainer. “I can be there around five, five-thirty,” I told him. “Okay?”

  “Sure. Great.”

  “I can’t stay long. I’ve got a date.”

  “That’s okay. Time for a drink?”

  “Just about. You want to tell me what’s up? Something about those letters?”

  “Sort of, yes.” He hesitated. “I’ve gotta go.”

  And he hung up, just like that.

  I went back to my conference table and sat beside Herm.

  “Look,” he said, “if you’ve got something important, this can wait.”

  “It’s not that important,” I said.

  Not that Herm Alberts’s prenuptial agreement ranked as a crisis, either.

  Professionally speaking, I believe in prenups. It’s always better to have things spelled out, to be prepared for the unanticipated, to acknowledge the well-documented fact that bad things happen to good people. That’s why they invented life insurance and wills. Nearly half of American marriages end in divorce. Divorces are messy. Legal, binding contracts minimize the mess. Besides, Massachusetts law tilts to the wife in divorce settlements.

  But personally I hate the idea of covering your bases before you get married. It makes divorce too easy. Prenups seem to me to put a price tag on love. They’re calculated, cold, squinty-eyed. Getting married is about romance, about infinitely wondrous possibilities, about forever and ever, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health. Not money.

  So my strategy with my clients is always to lay out the options and refuse to advise them. I tell them to discuss it with their prospective spouses, I insist on meeting with both of them, and I require the spouse-to-be to have her lawyer with her when anything is signed. If it becomes emotional, as it often does, I urge the couple to get counseling—which I don’t provide.

  Better before they get married than afterward.

  Herm Alberts had not yet discussed the subject with the woman he loved, a forty-something divorcee named Lauren Metcalf who would lose her alimony—and therefore virtually all her income—when she married Herm. Herm owned a chain of hardware stores and had a lot to lose, too.

  It was a tough call, and I was glad I didn’t have to make it.

  I shooed Herm out of my office around quarter of five and changed into my faded jeans and my old Adidas and my Yale sweatshirt—my picnic outfit, which I’d brought to the office in anticipation of my rendezvous with Evie at Walden Pond. I had driven my car to work that morning and parked it in the garage across the street for a quick getaway. I kept my old Army blanket in the trunk, as I had done since I was a teenager, where it was always handy for spontaneous fun in the woods.

  But first I had to go see Walt Duffy. The question was whether I should drive or walk.

  Walk, I decided. I’d get there twice as fast at rush hour on a Wednesday afternoon, and I wouldn’t have to worry about parking illegally under a “Residents Only” sign on Beacon Hill—or not finding a space at all.

  Julie was shutting down the office machines when I went out to the reception area. She looked at me and arched her eyebrows. “Going fishing? That your worm-digging outfit?”

  “You know I fish with flies,” I said. “Evie and I are having a picnic. I’m supposed to meet her at Walden in—” I glanced at my watch “—in a little less than two hours. First I’ve got to go see Walt Duffy.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why are you seeing Mr. Duffy if you’ve got a date?” The only thing that Julie considered more important than accruing billable hours was getting me married and settled down. She had high hopes for Evie and me.

  “It’s your fault,” I said. “You’re the one who insisted I take his call.”

  “Sure,” she said. “Blame me if you’re late.”

  “That’s why I pay you all that money,” I said. “To take the blame whenever there’s blame to be taken.”

  “Well, don’t stand around here talking to me. Go take care of Mr. Duffy, and make it snappy. We women don’t like to be kept waiting.”

  “Don’t I know it,” I said.

  It was another spectacular June afternoon—cloudless skies and warm sun, with a soft salty easterly breeze puffing in off the ocean. As I strolled down Boylston Street, I was acutely aware of what Julie called my “worm-digging” attire as I passed women in high heels and short skirts and men in their summer-weight suits and ties.

  I cut through the Public Garden and across the footbridge over the duck pond, crossed Beacon onto Charles, climbed Mt. Vernon Street, and banged the brass knocker on the door to Walt Duffy’s townhouse around five-thirty.

  I’d give Walt a half hour, max. Time for just one drink. Then I’d walk back to Copley Square and
rescue my car, and with any luck I’d only be a few minutes late for my picnic with Evie.

  I waited, hit the knocker again, and when there was no response, I headed around to the back alley. Ethan was probably out walking Henry, and Walt couldn’t answer the door even if he heard me knock.

  The alley behind Walt’s townhouse was barely the width of an average driveway. It was lined on both sides by ten-foot brick walls with wooden doorways cut into them. Walt’s was the fifth door on the left. I called his name, and when he didn’t answer, I checked the door. He’d left it open a crack for me.

  When I stepped inside, a gang of sparrows flew off in a panicky whir of wings.

  Walt was not sitting on his chaise, and it took me a moment to see that he was sprawled on the brick patio on the other side of the table from where I stood.

  “Hey, Walt,” I said. “You okay?”

  He didn’t answer.

  I went over and knelt beside him.

  He was sprawled on his back. His crutches lay on either side of him, as if he’d been using them and somehow lost his balance, fallen backward, and hit his head on the bricks.

  A dribble of wet blood ran from one nostril halfway down his cheek. His eyes were half-closed and he was gasping in rapid, shallow breaths that barely moved his chest. A little puddle of blood was pooling under his head.

  “Oh, Jesus,” I muttered.

  I hurried inside, found the telephone, and dialed 911. I gave Walt’s address and my name and told the woman that Walt had apparently fallen and hit his head on the brick patio.

  “Is he conscious?”

  “No.”

  “Is he breathing?”

  “Yes. Rapid, shallow breaths.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “I don’t know. I just got here. Recently, I think. The blood is wet.”

  “They’re on their way, sir. Please wait there. Cover him with a blanket, but don’t try to move him.”

  “Right,” I said.

  I found a blanket folded up on Walt’s sofa, took it out to the patio, and spread it over him.

  “Hey,” I said. “Hey, Walt.”

  His eyelids fluttered.

  “What happened, man? Talk to me.”