The Piano Room
My girl. My wisp.
She stiffens in his arms and lifts her head as if at a sound in the next room.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she replies, and there is nothing. Something seemed off, that’s all. She lets her body relax and returns her head to the curve of his arm.
*
“That man,” she said one evening, later, as they sat on the edge of the bed taking off their clothes in the pied-á-terre. “The one you represented pro bono.”
“I’ve done more than one.” Leland placed his ankle across his knee and untied the laces of his shoe.
“The one given life for murder. You got him out after twenty years. You told him to plead guilty and you’d get him out.”
“Ah, that one.” Leland let his shoe drop onto the floor and, after it, his sock.
“Either way, in prison or out,” she continued. “His life didn’t fit him. Twenty years in prison, living the life of a convict, knowing in his heart he was innocent. Released from prison, living as though innocent while the whole world, or most of it, anyway, thinks him guilty.” She removed her shoes and stood up to take off her blouse. “His life could never fit him again.” She took off her blouse and bra, her skirt and half slip. “People who remember the crime, the brutality of it…the young girl, fifteen at the time—”
“Sixteen.” Leland had removed his other shoe and sock, his shirt and trousers.
“Sixteen. Raped repeatedly, stabbed forty times…that made it personal. The police said so, you told me…forty stab wounds made it personal. Probably someone who knew the girl or knew her family, had a grudge, and your client didn’t—”
“That pointed to his innocence. He had no motive.”
She hung her jacket and skirt and blouse in the closet and sat back down on the bed to take off her pantyhose.
“Presumed innocent. Still, people think he’s guilty. The girl’s sixty-nine-year-old mother, she thinks he’s guilty. Not thinks. Knows. Knows in her heart he’s the violent sex offender who raped and mutilated her sixteen-year-old daughter. A guilty man walking free. Wherever he goes, even though he’s out and to all appearances innocent, the guilty man, the murderer, walks beside him. He’ll never be free of him.”
“Jenny—?”
She was naked now. They both were, sitting side by side on the bed. “For his whole life, for as along as he lives, his life won’t fit him.” She didn’t know what she was trying to say. That other person, speaking in that high-pitched, trembly voice, was taking her over. “It’s like he’s been cleaved in two. The two halves walk side by side down the street, but they’ll never cohere. For the rest of his life he’ll try to make them cohere but won’t be able to.” She felt dazed, disoriented. She thought she must be incoherent. “His life won’t ever fit him again. You told him to do it. ‘Plead guilty,’ you told him. ‘Plead guilty and walk free.’”
“Because I believed and still believe—”