Criminals
Bill Pieper
The plum-colored bathing suit. He’d never
forget it. There had always been a vibe between them and he remembered a
collage of other things about her, but the bathing suit, somehow, captured them
all. Out over the water on a rope swing at their favorite swimming hole in the
creek west of town.
You could tell she was scared, too, like a five-year-old copying her big sister, eyes wide and round and a jubilant, uneasy smile. But she wasn’t five, more like thirty, though her body was girlish, and it hurtled right by, almost under his nose, from where he stood on the bank above their other friends, who were in the water cheering her big splashdown. Before then she’d braved only the narrow trail to the sandy-muddy little beach.
He couldn’t remember if Gary, her geologist husband, was there that day. Not that it mattered. The bathing suit was already wet and clingy, and just before she let go, with the rope poised to fall back from its arc, she brought her legs up and the plum fabric molded to her pubic cleft and to her small, firm breasts, their nipples seemingly erect, as she dropped away hooting and laughing, her chestnut ponytail streaming upward in the sunlight.
His wife and three-year-old daughter, down on the beach, clapped their approval and yelled, “Go, Diana!” When she swam clear and the rope, tied high in a tree, swept toward him, he grabbed it to follow with a cannonball of his own and they clapped again. “Look, Kate, there’s daddy,” he heard Judy say, in the ecstatic moment before he hit the surface. Judy, who wouldn’t have gone near that rope for a million bucks.
Thirty years ago. A long time, and up past Mt. Shasta, hundreds of miles from the restaurant patio where he sat waiting for Diana to come through the door. He’d seen her before that, of course, and after—including once, very memorably, at Gumboot Lake—just not recently, not since their whole faculty gang at College of the Siskiyous had migrated to warmer, better-paying climes. She and Gary left for San Jose two summers later and soon divorced. He and Judy had moved to Sacramento and hung on till Martha, their younger daughter, fledged into grad school, when things between them fell all the way apart. They both still taught at campuses there, but other than events concerning the kids, their paths never crossed.
Which also served to cut off his news of Diana, since post Siskiyou, she’d kept in touch only through Judy, especially after moving to Australia with a new husband and taking her law practice with her. In California she’d been a public defender; over there, who knew what they called it. Regardless, a total surprise that she would arrange this dinner, saying she was on her way to visit family in Chicago and Judy wasn’t supposed to know.
His waiter’s approaching footsteps nudged him back to the present, where he had nursed down a glass of Merlot and grown so careless about checking the doorway that the footsteps turned out to be Diana, smiling, in a floral-print summer dress. He jumped to his feet.
“Alan,” she said, “sorry I’m late,” giving him a shoulder squeeze and quick peck on the cheek “You look wonderful!”
“For my age, I guess. As do you.” When he sat, the other chair didn’t hold some budding dowager, but a nicely feminine replica of who she’d been, allowing for dyed hair not quite matching his mental pictures and a light tracery of wrinkles on her oval face. That she was a tennis player and had never had children undoubtedly helped. “I like the dress,” he added.
“Thanks. A luxury to wear it. Bloody winter back home.”
He laughed. “Bloody, she says, but no Aussie accent.”
“Just doesn’t take on me. People think I’m a Yank right off the boat.”
“What about your husband?”
“Max? He is an Aussie.”
“Oh, right,” Alan said.
The place he’d chosen served tapas, so they ordered a procession of plates, a bottle of Tempranillo and talked together as if no time gap even existed. He hadn’t expected that, but maybe he should have. Things had always been easy between them—or almost always.
Tiny lights winked in the patio vegetation as dusk took hold, and on their table, the glow of a cut-glass oil lamp while they waited for dessert. “I’m glad we did this,” she said.
“Same here,” he nodded.
“I even worried I wouldn’t recognize you. Judy and the girls, yes. I haven’t seen her in a decade, but she sends photos on the Web.”
“With me edited out.” His tone was lightly mocking.
“Apparently,” she said, through a small, brief smile. “But the divorce was no surprise, not to me. Or to Judy, I don’t think.”
“Nor to me. A little tough on Marty and Kate at first, except now I’m on great terms with them, which I probably wouldn’t be if the split had come sooner.”
“Sounds right,” Diana said, “but there’s a further test. You haven’t brought home a wicked stepmother yet.”
“I’m in no rush,” he answered. “Those two are the light of my life.”
“Judy asked my advice on it, though...more than once. Hope you don’t mind.”
“No.” He made a dismissive gesture. “But yours was forever ago.”
“Not personal advice...legal,” she said. “Domestic law’s my new specialty. Restraining orders, child custody, property settlements...mediation mostly, and sure beats criminal.”
“Still...different country, different rules. Ours was pretty streamlined anyway.”
“I told her it would be. The rules aren’t so different.”
“Oh.”
At that point coffee arrived, accompanied by shallow dishes of flan. She tasted hers and pointed at it. “Mmm...good. But law aside,” she went on, “Max and I have been theorizing on a universal marriage code. Sort of a joke, but not entirely.”
“He’s a lawyer too?”
“No, a psychologist...” she challenged with her eyes, “like you.”
“OK...I’ll bite.” His eyes challenged back.
“Let’s see...the unforgivables are physical or emotional cruelty, bigamy, child abuse, and child abandonment. You do those, the marriage is presumptively over and whatever the law dishes out, you deserve. Pretty rational, actually.”
“Who gets to define those terms?” Alan said, switching from coffee to flan.
“The law...or the spouses...whichever threshold is lowest.”
“You forgot adultery.”
“Not on the list...unless you flaunt it, and emotional or physical cruelty enters in. If you contracept and you’re discreet, no harm done. But we count bringing home venereal disease or having unwanted children as cruelty. Physical fidelity, per se, is meaningless.”
“Really? The open marriage thing?”
“That’s one approach...if it can even be done...which we doubt. The greater truth is that spouses don’t want to know what they don’t want to know...period. It empowers women equally with men, by the way.” Her smile now was completely unreadable.
“Interesting,” he said. “You should have moved to France.”
“Oh, Melbourne will do, but spontaneous confessions are cruelty personified. It’s utterly selfish for one spouse to cleanse their conscience by ambushing their mate.”
He gave her a level, steady gaze. “And you practice what you preach?”
Her smile persisted. “If Max does, I wouldn’t know, would I?”
“I guess not. And yourself?”
“As I said,” she replied, “mainly a joke, but,” she was deliberately coquettish in picking up her coffee, adding, “under the right circumstances...”
Alan laughed and she joined in. “After all these years,” he said, “isn’t it a little late to be hitting on me...again?”
“Sadly, I’m not.” She took a sip and looked at her watch. “In ninety minutes I drop my rental at your airport for a red-eye to O’Hare.” She put down her cup and returned his gaze. “But both of us felt something back then.”
“Yeah,” he said, “Gumboot Lake.”
“That’s the main reason I’m here.”
“And why you bypassed Judy?”
“I might see her on my way home. First, I owe you...well...it’s a day I’ve been sick about ever since.”
“I have regrets too.” He paused to wash down a spoonful of flan. “That I didn’t let you seduce me.”
Her eyes were still on him, flirtatiousness gone. “Don’t be too sure. And mine are far beyond that. Remember why we were there, in that deserted campground?”
“Kind of,” he said. “My new camera. You needed crime-scene pics for some client you were defending.” In one quick flashback Alan saw his long-gone jeep parked near the lake’s topaz expanse, smooth among the gently swaying pines of a spring afternoon. How quiet it was on that western shoulder of Mt. Shasta, the very headwaters of the Sacramento River, with brownish drifts of fallen pine needles everywhere. And how perfectly sweet she’d been, the plum bathing suit already a memory from the previous summer.
“Well I lost that case, and the pictures were only a subterfuge. But...stupidly…I used them in court. The guy,” her voice wavered, “was innocent, too. I found out the conviction cost him his marriage...along with the right to visit his son.”
He leaned toward her across the table. “Oh, come on, D, how could you know he was innocent?”
“He just was...and so guileless. Twenty-three, fresh from county jail on a joyriding charge...which he admitted doing...and hitching home to his wife in Redding. A couple of dirtballs picked him up at a highway entrance and said they’d take him the whole way, but he’d have to stay overnight with them at the lake.”
“OK,” Alan said, “it’s coming back. Next morning, sheriff’s deputies show up, the truck your guy traveled in was full of stolen property and all three are busted.”
“Right. But my client, Lloyd, had camped separately from the other two. Your photos made me think the deputy who confiscated his backpack would corroborate that, and nothing stolen was in it. Next, I’d have the other guys confirm he’d been hitching and they didn’t know him.”
“So?”
“The dirtballs clammed up, took plea bargains and were extradited to Oregon. Lloyd insisted he was innocent, wouldn’t bargain and pissed off the prosecutor and judge so they hustled through a trial, the deputy claimed he couldn’t remember the location of the pack, and Lloyd got five years. I was devastated. I still am. The pictures proved absolutely nothing.”
“Not if they’re all you had.”
“I believed in him so much I went to sleep...assumed everybody would just see it my way. I needed to challenge those bargains, delay the extraditions.”
“It’s thirty years past, Diana,” he said gently, “You win some, you lose some.”
“No, that way you only lose. Lloyd got nothing like my best effort. Worse, he’s the one consoling me. ‘It’s OK, Mrs. Diana, you tried’...he always said ‘Mrs. Diana’...‘those guys were criminals. Any dummy could see that! I should’ve known!’ He’s why I gave up law for a while...and criminal law for good.”
“I’m sorry for how it weighs on you,” he said, leaning forward on his elbows, barely a foot from her. “But if seeing me gives permission to talk it through, then good.”
“No, there’s more. I should never have had those pictures, much less used them, and I kept my distance from you afterwards. Maybe you didn’t notice.”
“Oh, I noticed. Logical, since I made you feel rejected, but a little overdone. Too bad you and I weren’t single at the same time somewhere along the way.”
“Yes,” she said, looking conflicted, “but the photos...the whole thing was Judy’s idea.”
“She’s no lawyer.”
“She thought you were having an affair with Susan Moultrie. You know, the hippie who babysat for lots of faculty and...”
“Why bring that up?” he sighed. “I remember Susan, but most of Judy’s crazy jealousies, I don’t.” True, yet his mind was full of the scenes she used to make and how she would drop in on his classes to eyeball the female students and the way she virtually stalked some of his women colleagues. No amount of reassurance was ever enough. In public, she was poised and cordial, but in private, wild and dramatic and prying.
“At the lake,” Diana went on, as if peering into her own eyes, not out from them, “when I got so vampy, I was...was supposed to act as her agent, to see if we could unmask you. Gary and I had been fighting because he slept with Susan and did the confession thing, so I let Judy feed me claptrap about reigning in male privilege. As though the real objective isn’t creating equal privilege for women, across the board.”
She shook her head, then continued. “You didn’t respond...didn’t take any of my bait. Which I reported to Judy, but I’ve been ashamed ever since. I’m the criminal...me!”
He had another flash of that day, and a hollow tympani beat of recognition sounded in his skull. Everything fit. Diana’s face as close as it was now, but with a kiss-me aura, and her voice talking about how she wished the weather wasn’t too cold for skinny dipping and about this other lake in Illinois where she used to neck with her high school boyfriend.
“I don’t know why I didn’t respond,” he said. “Maybe because Gary was my friend or because you were Judy’s. I’ve agonized over it, but I couldn’t believe what was happening.” Alan reached to encircle her hand. “Besides, I’m a criminal myself. Even if Judy’s attitude made confessing impossible, it wasn’t just paranoia. I’ve slept with some colleagues and I did have an affair with Susan. She got around.”
Although he expected her to, Diana didn’t pull away. Instead, she looked at him with a smile of pure wonder. “I wasn’t just pretending either, I actually wanted you.”
He smiled too. “Do you remember that plum bathing suit you had?”
“Not really,” she answered, “but I could have lied to Judy, couldn’t I?”
“Yes, we both could have, for a while, anyway...and I’m sure Lloyd forgives you as well.” When he lightly squeezed her hand she squeezed back, harder.
You could tell she was scared, too, like a five-year-old copying her big sister, eyes wide and round and a jubilant, uneasy smile. But she wasn’t five, more like thirty, though her body was girlish, and it hurtled right by, almost under his nose, from where he stood on the bank above their other friends, who were in the water cheering her big splashdown. Before then she’d braved only the narrow trail to the sandy-muddy little beach.
He couldn’t remember if Gary, her geologist husband, was there that day. Not that it mattered. The bathing suit was already wet and clingy, and just before she let go, with the rope poised to fall back from its arc, she brought her legs up and the plum fabric molded to her pubic cleft and to her small, firm breasts, their nipples seemingly erect, as she dropped away hooting and laughing, her chestnut ponytail streaming upward in the sunlight.
His wife and three-year-old daughter, down on the beach, clapped their approval and yelled, “Go, Diana!” When she swam clear and the rope, tied high in a tree, swept toward him, he grabbed it to follow with a cannonball of his own and they clapped again. “Look, Kate, there’s daddy,” he heard Judy say, in the ecstatic moment before he hit the surface. Judy, who wouldn’t have gone near that rope for a million bucks.
Thirty years ago. A long time, and up past Mt. Shasta, hundreds of miles from the restaurant patio where he sat waiting for Diana to come through the door. He’d seen her before that, of course, and after—including once, very memorably, at Gumboot Lake—just not recently, not since their whole faculty gang at College of the Siskiyous had migrated to warmer, better-paying climes. She and Gary left for San Jose two summers later and soon divorced. He and Judy had moved to Sacramento and hung on till Martha, their younger daughter, fledged into grad school, when things between them fell all the way apart. They both still taught at campuses there, but other than events concerning the kids, their paths never crossed.
Which also served to cut off his news of Diana, since post Siskiyou, she’d kept in touch only through Judy, especially after moving to Australia with a new husband and taking her law practice with her. In California she’d been a public defender; over there, who knew what they called it. Regardless, a total surprise that she would arrange this dinner, saying she was on her way to visit family in Chicago and Judy wasn’t supposed to know.
His waiter’s approaching footsteps nudged him back to the present, where he had nursed down a glass of Merlot and grown so careless about checking the doorway that the footsteps turned out to be Diana, smiling, in a floral-print summer dress. He jumped to his feet.
“Alan,” she said, “sorry I’m late,” giving him a shoulder squeeze and quick peck on the cheek “You look wonderful!”
“For my age, I guess. As do you.” When he sat, the other chair didn’t hold some budding dowager, but a nicely feminine replica of who she’d been, allowing for dyed hair not quite matching his mental pictures and a light tracery of wrinkles on her oval face. That she was a tennis player and had never had children undoubtedly helped. “I like the dress,” he added.
“Thanks. A luxury to wear it. Bloody winter back home.”
He laughed. “Bloody, she says, but no Aussie accent.”
“Just doesn’t take on me. People think I’m a Yank right off the boat.”
“What about your husband?”
“Max? He is an Aussie.”
“Oh, right,” Alan said.
The place he’d chosen served tapas, so they ordered a procession of plates, a bottle of Tempranillo and talked together as if no time gap even existed. He hadn’t expected that, but maybe he should have. Things had always been easy between them—or almost always.
Tiny lights winked in the patio vegetation as dusk took hold, and on their table, the glow of a cut-glass oil lamp while they waited for dessert. “I’m glad we did this,” she said.
“Same here,” he nodded.
“I even worried I wouldn’t recognize you. Judy and the girls, yes. I haven’t seen her in a decade, but she sends photos on the Web.”
“With me edited out.” His tone was lightly mocking.
“Apparently,” she said, through a small, brief smile. “But the divorce was no surprise, not to me. Or to Judy, I don’t think.”
“Nor to me. A little tough on Marty and Kate at first, except now I’m on great terms with them, which I probably wouldn’t be if the split had come sooner.”
“Sounds right,” Diana said, “but there’s a further test. You haven’t brought home a wicked stepmother yet.”
“I’m in no rush,” he answered. “Those two are the light of my life.”
“Judy asked my advice on it, though...more than once. Hope you don’t mind.”
“No.” He made a dismissive gesture. “But yours was forever ago.”
“Not personal advice...legal,” she said. “Domestic law’s my new specialty. Restraining orders, child custody, property settlements...mediation mostly, and sure beats criminal.”
“Still...different country, different rules. Ours was pretty streamlined anyway.”
“I told her it would be. The rules aren’t so different.”
“Oh.”
At that point coffee arrived, accompanied by shallow dishes of flan. She tasted hers and pointed at it. “Mmm...good. But law aside,” she went on, “Max and I have been theorizing on a universal marriage code. Sort of a joke, but not entirely.”
“He’s a lawyer too?”
“No, a psychologist...” she challenged with her eyes, “like you.”
“OK...I’ll bite.” His eyes challenged back.
“Let’s see...the unforgivables are physical or emotional cruelty, bigamy, child abuse, and child abandonment. You do those, the marriage is presumptively over and whatever the law dishes out, you deserve. Pretty rational, actually.”
“Who gets to define those terms?” Alan said, switching from coffee to flan.
“The law...or the spouses...whichever threshold is lowest.”
“You forgot adultery.”
“Not on the list...unless you flaunt it, and emotional or physical cruelty enters in. If you contracept and you’re discreet, no harm done. But we count bringing home venereal disease or having unwanted children as cruelty. Physical fidelity, per se, is meaningless.”
“Really? The open marriage thing?”
“That’s one approach...if it can even be done...which we doubt. The greater truth is that spouses don’t want to know what they don’t want to know...period. It empowers women equally with men, by the way.” Her smile now was completely unreadable.
“Interesting,” he said. “You should have moved to France.”
“Oh, Melbourne will do, but spontaneous confessions are cruelty personified. It’s utterly selfish for one spouse to cleanse their conscience by ambushing their mate.”
He gave her a level, steady gaze. “And you practice what you preach?”
Her smile persisted. “If Max does, I wouldn’t know, would I?”
“I guess not. And yourself?”
“As I said,” she replied, “mainly a joke, but,” she was deliberately coquettish in picking up her coffee, adding, “under the right circumstances...”
Alan laughed and she joined in. “After all these years,” he said, “isn’t it a little late to be hitting on me...again?”
“Sadly, I’m not.” She took a sip and looked at her watch. “In ninety minutes I drop my rental at your airport for a red-eye to O’Hare.” She put down her cup and returned his gaze. “But both of us felt something back then.”
“Yeah,” he said, “Gumboot Lake.”
“That’s the main reason I’m here.”
“And why you bypassed Judy?”
“I might see her on my way home. First, I owe you...well...it’s a day I’ve been sick about ever since.”
“I have regrets too.” He paused to wash down a spoonful of flan. “That I didn’t let you seduce me.”
Her eyes were still on him, flirtatiousness gone. “Don’t be too sure. And mine are far beyond that. Remember why we were there, in that deserted campground?”
“Kind of,” he said. “My new camera. You needed crime-scene pics for some client you were defending.” In one quick flashback Alan saw his long-gone jeep parked near the lake’s topaz expanse, smooth among the gently swaying pines of a spring afternoon. How quiet it was on that western shoulder of Mt. Shasta, the very headwaters of the Sacramento River, with brownish drifts of fallen pine needles everywhere. And how perfectly sweet she’d been, the plum bathing suit already a memory from the previous summer.
“Well I lost that case, and the pictures were only a subterfuge. But...stupidly…I used them in court. The guy,” her voice wavered, “was innocent, too. I found out the conviction cost him his marriage...along with the right to visit his son.”
He leaned toward her across the table. “Oh, come on, D, how could you know he was innocent?”
“He just was...and so guileless. Twenty-three, fresh from county jail on a joyriding charge...which he admitted doing...and hitching home to his wife in Redding. A couple of dirtballs picked him up at a highway entrance and said they’d take him the whole way, but he’d have to stay overnight with them at the lake.”
“OK,” Alan said, “it’s coming back. Next morning, sheriff’s deputies show up, the truck your guy traveled in was full of stolen property and all three are busted.”
“Right. But my client, Lloyd, had camped separately from the other two. Your photos made me think the deputy who confiscated his backpack would corroborate that, and nothing stolen was in it. Next, I’d have the other guys confirm he’d been hitching and they didn’t know him.”
“So?”
“The dirtballs clammed up, took plea bargains and were extradited to Oregon. Lloyd insisted he was innocent, wouldn’t bargain and pissed off the prosecutor and judge so they hustled through a trial, the deputy claimed he couldn’t remember the location of the pack, and Lloyd got five years. I was devastated. I still am. The pictures proved absolutely nothing.”
“Not if they’re all you had.”
“I believed in him so much I went to sleep...assumed everybody would just see it my way. I needed to challenge those bargains, delay the extraditions.”
“It’s thirty years past, Diana,” he said gently, “You win some, you lose some.”
“No, that way you only lose. Lloyd got nothing like my best effort. Worse, he’s the one consoling me. ‘It’s OK, Mrs. Diana, you tried’...he always said ‘Mrs. Diana’...‘those guys were criminals. Any dummy could see that! I should’ve known!’ He’s why I gave up law for a while...and criminal law for good.”
“I’m sorry for how it weighs on you,” he said, leaning forward on his elbows, barely a foot from her. “But if seeing me gives permission to talk it through, then good.”
“No, there’s more. I should never have had those pictures, much less used them, and I kept my distance from you afterwards. Maybe you didn’t notice.”
“Oh, I noticed. Logical, since I made you feel rejected, but a little overdone. Too bad you and I weren’t single at the same time somewhere along the way.”
“Yes,” she said, looking conflicted, “but the photos...the whole thing was Judy’s idea.”
“She’s no lawyer.”
“She thought you were having an affair with Susan Moultrie. You know, the hippie who babysat for lots of faculty and...”
“Why bring that up?” he sighed. “I remember Susan, but most of Judy’s crazy jealousies, I don’t.” True, yet his mind was full of the scenes she used to make and how she would drop in on his classes to eyeball the female students and the way she virtually stalked some of his women colleagues. No amount of reassurance was ever enough. In public, she was poised and cordial, but in private, wild and dramatic and prying.
“At the lake,” Diana went on, as if peering into her own eyes, not out from them, “when I got so vampy, I was...was supposed to act as her agent, to see if we could unmask you. Gary and I had been fighting because he slept with Susan and did the confession thing, so I let Judy feed me claptrap about reigning in male privilege. As though the real objective isn’t creating equal privilege for women, across the board.”
She shook her head, then continued. “You didn’t respond...didn’t take any of my bait. Which I reported to Judy, but I’ve been ashamed ever since. I’m the criminal...me!”
He had another flash of that day, and a hollow tympani beat of recognition sounded in his skull. Everything fit. Diana’s face as close as it was now, but with a kiss-me aura, and her voice talking about how she wished the weather wasn’t too cold for skinny dipping and about this other lake in Illinois where she used to neck with her high school boyfriend.
“I don’t know why I didn’t respond,” he said. “Maybe because Gary was my friend or because you were Judy’s. I’ve agonized over it, but I couldn’t believe what was happening.” Alan reached to encircle her hand. “Besides, I’m a criminal myself. Even if Judy’s attitude made confessing impossible, it wasn’t just paranoia. I’ve slept with some colleagues and I did have an affair with Susan. She got around.”
Although he expected her to, Diana didn’t pull away. Instead, she looked at him with a smile of pure wonder. “I wasn’t just pretending either, I actually wanted you.”
He smiled too. “Do you remember that plum bathing suit you had?”
“Not really,” she answered, “but I could have lied to Judy, couldn’t I?”
“Yes, we both could have, for a while, anyway...and I’m sure Lloyd forgives you as well.” When he lightly squeezed her hand she squeezed back, harder.
