M.J. Rose | Novels: Flesh Tones, Excerpt

Excerpt

Chapter One

New York City Criminal Court Building, Room 1317
Friday, December 4, 1992 9:30 A.M.

Worried the jury will misinterpret my seeming calm for contempt or worse, my lawyer, Benjamin Marks, is unsure about putting me on the stand when the time comes.

But the female members of the jury will understand. I am just another woman who has loved a man too much. There are so many of us - none of us are proud that we put a man first. Most of us will never forgive ourselves for what we gave up. Yet, if we had to do it over, how many of us would chose to do it any differently?

I should have known better - but somehow I got lost in George Gabriel.

So even though I appear calm, some of those women will understand that I'm not. I'm not calm, I'm paralyzed; since George Gabriel died I've lost all feeling. Unclear about what's right and what's wrong, I can't make up my mind anymore, or concentrate. I cannot even cry.

Although aware of everything going on around me - Judge Bailey welcoming the jury in his orator's voice, the bailiff, an elderly black man with a limp standing at attention and staring at the clock, the clerk typist's fingers silently lifting and landing - I'm unable to connect any of this ordered activity to me, or my life.

Gabriel's paintings should be hanging in this musty courtroom shedding their luminous light instead of the dirty tarp stretched across the wall hiding the mural of Justice that Judge Bailey has just explained to the jury was damaged by a leak.

"It is not the law that is in need of reparation in this room - simply the representation of her holding her scales," he is saying to twelve men and women who made up the jury - a blur of faces that I cannot focus on. Not now. Not yet. Instead I study the stretch of fabric. Edges unraveling, gaping like a badly hung drapery, the canvas, which smells of mildew, casts a dull pall which is unrelieved by the weak winter light coming through the windows. Outside, the wind blows and several bare tree branches tap, tap, tap against the windowpanes, rattling the glass.

Judge Bailey finishes his introductory remarks takes off his gold rimmed spectacles, wipes them with a clean white handkerchief, replaces them on the bridge of his beak-like nose and nods to the Assistant District Attorney: "Miss Zavidow," he says savoring the ceremony. "Would you care to make your opening statement?"

From the moment the Assistant District Attorney rises, she focuses all her attention on the jury: "Ladies and Gentlemen, George Gabriel is unable to come forward and speak to you of the circumstances surrounding his death, unable to point his finger at his lover, Genny Haviland, and say she did it, she murdered me. And so on his behalf, I point my finger at Genny Haviland and say she did it; she committed this gross and unholy crime."

Linda Zavidow partially turns away form the jury box - each man and woman following her movements with their eyes - and, lifting her arm, energetically points across the courtroom toward the defendant's table at me.

Rubbing the palm of my right hand up and down the sleeve of my black cashmere sweater, I try to relieve the itching that has started up again and at the same time try not to open any fresh scabs.

What a clever choice the D.A.'s office made when they assigned Linda Zavidow to prosecute my case. A man up there would look like a bully; a less attractive or older woman might appear envious of me. But Linda Zavidow, who's my age, thirty-eight, with soft green eyes, chin length shining blonde hair, and a wide wedding band on her finger can get away with saying almost anything. Ultimately it will come down to her against me, won't it? And compared to Linda Zavidow I am dark, brooding, untamed; and certainly capable of - how did she just refer to it - this gross and unholy crime.

"Over the next week or so," Linda continues, "my job as the prosecuting attorney, will be to make you see how deeply, how obsessively, Genny Haviland loved George Gabriel and how that love turned into an equally great hate - so great it motivated her to kill him. I will fill in the background, set the scene, and present the evidence: a jigsaw puzzle of information for you to piece together.

"It won't be easy. You'll hear many hours of testimony from witnesses who will each swear to be telling the truth. Your job is to be cynical and suspicious, to question each answer you hear. What seems plausible? What doesn't? Which witnesses are telling the truth? Which aren't? What does each have to gain? Or to lose?

"These questions will be most crucial when it comes to the defense's argument. Mr. Marks will have you believe Genny Haviland's story is reliable. But I contend it has been completely fabricated; not the truth at all, but a lie concocted to save her life."

Now Linda turns completely around to look at me, and as Benjamin has instructed me to, I meet her eyes so she has no choice but to be the one to look away when she turns back to the jury.

She wants them to believe it's only the answers that matter, but from making films I know it's the questions that shape a story and move it in either one direction or another. By now, Linda's already talked to every witness and discovered which questions to ask and which to discard in order to elicit the right answers.

But what about all the other questions?

What about my questions? What does it mean that for the last three months I have been unable to say goodbye to George Gabriel? Unable to mourn him? Why is it that although my future is in jeopardy, I only think about my past with him? Gabriel once cautioned me that by trying to dissect what bound us, each to the other, I would trivialize it, make it suspect. He said our connection to each other would defy time, that even if we tried, we would never be able to completely let go of each other.

I thought after so many years without him, I would have had gotten used to missing him, but that was simply missing someone who wasn't with me - he was still on this planet, just keeping some other place warm. Now he was not even a body buried somewhere, but ashes emptied out of a plane window, caught in a wind, blown away.

"Although I have described this crime to you during jury selection, " Linda Zavidow continues, "I would like to repeat it to you now as designated jurors with all the responsibility that implies.

"The Grand Jury of the County of New York by this indictment accuses the defendant of the crime of murder in the second degree, committed as follows: The defendant acting alone, in the County of New York, on September 18, 1992, knowingly caused the death of George Gabriel by drugging him with a narcotic and then suffocating him to death.

"This is a case, of cold blooded murder --" Linda says and then stops as if she's too shook up by her own words to continue.

Beside me, Benjamin Marks shakes his head, disapproving the Assistant D.A.'s theatrics while behind me, my father breathes deeply. I, always in tune with my father even when we're angry with each other as he is with me now, can almost believe his breath is being expelled from my mouth. It's killing him that he has not, cannot, protect me from this. But to do that, he would have had to be a different father and a different man.

"As a woman who has been in love," Linda's voice softens, "my whole heart goes out to Genny Haviland. What a fantasy George Gabriel must have seemed when she first met him twenty years ago? A successful artist. An attractive, charming sensual man who was part of her parents' world. How could she not have idolized him? So imagine, if you will, how traumatized Genny must have been when this man proved not to be a fantasy at all, but a narcissistic, egotistical artist who didn't always treat the people who loved him well. Throughout their relationship he was cruel to Genny. Irresponsible. Ultimately impregnating her and then insisting -- no demanding she abort their child despite her own wishes and beliefs.

"But since when, ladies and gentleman, is being selfish a just cause for murder?"

Copyright © 2002 by M.J. Rose

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