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7

WHEN I GOT THERE, the door to Annie’s apartment was open and she was in it. She reached her hands up to my shoulders, stood on tiptoe, and touched my lips with hers. She made me feel like we were a couple of kids. Skipping across the meadow. Picking up lots of forget-me-nots.

Annie is in her mid-thirties. She is five feet tall and has fine bones and not enough muscle on them to nudge her much past one hundred pounds. Her hair is the colour of Mr. Poe’s raven, and she wears it short and flat and pulled back behind her ears. Her cheekbones are high and her chin has a slight forward thrust. The combination gives her a feisty look about which she displays no self-consciousness.

She had on beige trousers with legs that narrowed and tightened until they stopped six inches above her ankles. They went with low-heeled white leather shoes and a white silk shirt that had billowy sleeves and was unbuttoned to the space between her breasts. The first time I met Annie, I said she looked Parisian. She said other men before me had told her the same thing. I said I’d see them at dawn with pistols. She said she grew up in a village northwest of Toronto called Palgrave. So much for the male powers of observation.

Annie had a Kir going. She went into the kitchen and made me a vodka martini on the rocks according to my favourite mix. Hold the vermouth, hold the olive, hold the twist.

I’d been home, showered, changed, and applied ice to my right ear. It still hurt. It was red and stuck out a little. It didn’t go with the spiffy ensemble I’d chosen.

“I’ll try two guesses,” Annie said. I was watching her from the doorway into the 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 Rioja was all gone. I made motions at the waiter.

I said to Annie, “Maybe not larger but pertinent to what we’re talking about. These people, my beloved clients, aren’t entirely rational. If they were, I’d probably find them dull. They pull these crazy stunts. Get themselves behind life’s eight ball.”

“Everybody has a run of lousy luck now and then,” Annie said. “The difference is, your people go looking for the eight balls.”

“What makes them into bandits?” I said. “I’m fascinated to know if there’s an answer.”

“Maybe you’ll never find out.”

“The quest of a lifetime.”

The waiter poured more wine from the new bottle into our glasses. He poured with his right hand and held the left behind his back at the correct slope.

“Tom Catalano’s still a nice guy,” I said.

“You’ll do too,” Annie said.

I gave her an aw-shucks smile.

“Do I sound cranky about you sometimes?” Annie said.

She didn’t wait for me to answer. I would have fibbed anyway.

“It’s the rewards,” Annie said. “Or the status. I want the return for you that you ought to have earned. Okay, I’m talking from a perspective I might not be entitled to. I’ll never make a big buck reviewing movies. Never expected to. But you, a lawyer, all those years at school, you . . . ah hell, Crang.”

“You aren’t going to say I could be a somebody,” I said.

“Not that clichéd,” Annie said. “I was almost about to ask you to be more serious, but that’s not right either.”

“Serious tends to be dull. Natural equation.”

“Tedious you’re not.”

“This line of conversation has stalemated.”

“Leave it at this,” Annie said. “I hope your Mr. Wansborough is a harbinger of clients to come.”

I couldn’t locate another mussel in my paella. Out of oysters, too. I went on a search for chicken.

“On the subject of careers,” I said, “how was Richard Gere’s bare ass this afternoon?”

“Bare ass!” Annie said. There was an exclamation point in her voice. “We’re talking full frontal nudity here. The man’s basing stardom on his genitalia. What’s worse, private parts aside, his acting’s so bloody mannered, the Meryl Streep of his sex.”

Annie had a thought or two about performing mannerisms. All actors include them in their equipment, she said; the good ones make them disappear. Annie’s thought or two expanded to a thesis. She said she admired Robert De Niro’s technique. She said it was close to seamless. Annie was intense as she talked, and at the same time she was having fun with her subject. She said the older English actors had technique that vanished before one’s very eyes. Annie thought it was amazing.

She talked, I played audience, enjoying it, and after the wine was gone, we had Spanish coffees, and Annie began to wind down.

“Gere had a line in the movie today you could handle,” she said to me.

“Set the scene.”

“It’s one of those 1940s nightclubs you only see in movies,” Annie said. “Never existed otherwise. Women in slinky gowns, everybody smoking like mad, an orchestra with violins, waiters in tuxedos, and Gere’s coming on to the gorgeous lady with the sultry look. Get the picture? The orchestra’s playing a tango and Gere says—”

“—your place or mine?”

“Your reading lacks a certain je ne sais quoi but the wording’s on the money.”

We finished our Spanish coffees. I paid the bill and tipped the waiter, who looked pleased as punch. And Annie and I resolved the Richard Gere dilemma. We went to her place, and some of the time we slept.