kitchen. She had her back to me, getting out the ice and pouring the vodka. “The hot new fashion along your part of trendy Queen West is dyeing one ear vermilion. Or, my second guess, somebody’s lodged a tomato in your right ear and the damned thing won’t come out.”
“Wrong vegetable,” I said. “In the boxing world, we call this incipient cauliflower.”
“You aren’t in the boxing world,” Annie said. She turned in the kitchen and handed me the drink. Our fingers touched on the side of the glass. “If I remember the tidbits of autobiography you’ve laid on me, you haven’t been in it for twenty years.”
“Technically I’ve never been in it,” I said. We stayed talking in the kitchen. Cozy. “I boxed at university. That’s as much like the real thing as Neil Diamond is like Dick Haymes.”
“To me,” Annie said, “fighting is fighting whether you do it at an institution of higher learning or at Maple Leaf Gardens.”
“True.”
“So how did you get the mean-looking ear?”
“I’ll tell you over dinner. You’ll love it.”
“Dinner probably, the story I doubt it.”
We ate at Costa Basque on the part of Avenue Road where the nice old houses have been converted into restaurants, stores that sell expensive objets, and offices for lawyers who handle lucrative divorce actions. Costa Basque is laid out on a series of balconies, each overlooking a central courtyard. We sat on the top balcony. It’s more intimate up there, away from the guitarist on the ground floor and the conversation of the folks at the bar who ask him to play “Yellow Bird.” Second-most-popular request in the place. First is “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head.” Good old Basque tunes.
The waiter handed us menus. He was young and trim and fey. I asked for a bottle of white Rioja. The waiter scampered after it. I studied the menu.
“About the ear,” Annie said.
“Hey, first things first,” I said from behind the menu. “Man’s gotta think about his nourishment.”
Annie said, “You’re going to order the pâté followed by paella.”
I looked up.
“I think you just called me predictable.”
“You operate in patterns,” Annie said. “You go at something long enough until you reason out the course of action you think is going to work best. From there on in, you never deviate. This restaurant, for one teeny example, we’ve come here, what, four times. The last three, you’ve had the pâté followed by paella.”
“Maybe not predictable,” I said. “Maybe pigheaded.”
“I’m not being critical, old darling.”
“Criticism is your game.”
“Reviewer,” Annie said. “Movie reviewer.”
The waiter covered the bottom of my glass with wine. I tasted it and pronounced it splendid. The waiter beamed at me.
We ordered. Annie said she’d have green salad and grouper. I said I’d have pâté and paella. I gave the words a John Gielgud twist. Even, measured, lofty. It got a small snicker out of Annie.
“At the risk of doing an imitation of a broken record,” she said, “the ear.”
I started with the fight on the dirt road and worked back to Wans-borough’s visit to my office.
“Your first respectable client in living memory,” Annie said when I was finished, “and you get yourself punched.”
“Irony makes the world go round, as somebody must have said.”
“Dorothy Parker?”
“Not sage enough for Lillian Hellman.”
“Right. Too frivolous.”
“Author unknown,” I said.
The waiter arrived with the salad and pâté. The pâté was made with ham and chicken livers and had a grainy texture that was dandy. For a few moments we chewed and made approving noises.
Annie said, “Skipping right along to topic B on the agenda, let’s consider your strange clients.”
“You and Tom Catalano.”
“Case in point,” Annie said. “Your friend Tom has everything a good lawyer’s brain can earn him, security and respectability and all those other qualities that our society legitimately salutes, and I don’t think he feels he’s compromising his standards by acting for people who actually wear ties.”
A drop of tarragon dressing hung stubbornly to the side of Annie’s mouth. I didn’t blame it, but I reached over and dabbed it away with my napkin.
I said, “Shall I tell you about my insatiable appetite for the freelance life? The urge to go it alone? Be my own man? The Jack London of the legal world?”
“Try for something more profound.”
“How about this: I like short stories.”
“That’s profound? That isn’t even relevant.”
I put down my fork and picked up the last piece of pâté on the plate with my fingers.
I said, “The police arrest a guy. We go to court. People testify. The Crown has its version of what happened. I have mine. Themes take shape. Strands unravel. We get conflict, and in the end we get resolution. Someone makes a decision, the judge, the jury. Beginning, middle, conclusion. Sometimes a surprise conclusion.”
“I’ll grant you this, Crang, you give it the structure of a short story.”
“Criminal cases are like that in court,” I said. “John Cheever couldn’t have written them better.”
“More like O. Henry.”
“Whoever. I’m hooked on the narrative every time I go to court. Can Tom Catalano say as much, him with his security and respectability? He expends that brain of his on civil actions that have one consistent theme, who owes how much to whom.”
The waiter cleared away the empty plates. He put the grouper in front of Annie and the paella in front of me. He wished us bon appétit.
“There’s something else,” I said.
“Isn’t there always.”
“A relationship develops between me and my clients,” I said. “Lousy word, relationship. Stop me before I say interface. Still, there’s something that connects me and them. Guy in jail, at that moment he has only one positive element in his life, his lawyer. Family doesn’t count in jail, if he has any, friends don’t count, not other cons. He’s cut off from what we might laughably call his normal environment except for me, his counsel. That circumstance, like it or not, means that my connection with him develops along upbeat lines. I like it.”
“You’re beginning to sound more social worker than criminal counsel,” Annie said.
I shrugged. I was having a swell time with the paella. First a piece of veal, then a couple of mussels, an oyster, a tiny chunk of chicken, some rice, sniff the fumes, inhale the saffron. I felt like rubbing my tummy and saying goody goody.
“The trouble with it all,” Annie said, “the way you feel about those people in jail, is that it’s bound to distance you from the rest of the world.”
“The straight world you’re talking about,” I said.
“There must be a better adjective.”
“The straight world gets a trifle bent,” I said. “Cops tell fibs. Crown attorneys push witnesses around. Judges reveal cruel streaks. Small points but true.”
“Is there a larger point?” Annie asked.
The