The Unnamed - By Joshua Ferris Page 0,45

turned to him slowly. She looked at him and then lifted the wineglass. She inadvertently clinked her teeth against the glass, making a ringing sound and causing the liquid inside to break like a golden wave and splash her face. “Mmmm,” she said, setting the glass down and reaching precariously over the kitchen island for a napkin. She sat back heavily on the stool and wiped away the wine.

“Banana?” he said.

“Hmmm?”

“How many glasses of wine have you had?”

She didn’t answer.

“Tonight, too? It had to be tonight, too, Janey?”

“Mmmm,” she said, getting off the stool. “The lamb.” She walked to the oven as if through water. With the oven door open she stood again and turned around, peering across the kitchen. “The hot mitt go?”

“Let me do that,” he said, taking the hot mitt from her hand.

“I got drunk,” she said.

“I noticed,” he said. “When did that happen?”

She reached out for him. She was wobbling and he held her in his arms trying to contain her. “On and off in the bathroom,” she said.

He returned to the living room with beers and Frank announced that he wanted to make a toast. “To your house,” he said. They all clinked frosted mugs and drank to Tim’s house. Then Tim broke the news that Jane wasn’t feeling well and had gone upstairs to lie down. She might be out for the night. Frank and Linda expressed concern.

“We should go then, maybe,” Linda said to Frank.

“No, please,” said Tim. “I’d hate—”

Jane walked into the room. “You must be Hank,” she said.

Tim turned around as Jane came forward to shake Frank’s hand. She tripped on the rug, steadied herself and looked down at her feet. Then she turned and left the room.

All three of them stared with great stillness at the doorway. Tim stood. “She must be feeling better,” he said to his guests. Then he almost collided with her as she came back in. “I forgot my drink,” she said, flicking spilled wine from her hand as she transferred the glass.

“His name is Frank,” he whispered fiercely.

As they ate appetizers, Tim and Frank made small talk about TVs and appetizers in general and then, for some reason, and for a long time, Chex Mix in particular. He didn’t want to talk about Chex Mix. He wanted to share with Frank, a man who could be trusted, the physical and psychic toll of all his recent months in the room.

“Yorba Linda,” he overheard Jane say to Frank’s wife. “Where Richard Nixon was born.”

“Yorba Linda?” said Frank’s wife.

“Because I was thinking, Linda, Linda, because of your name, and then I thought, Yorba Linda.”

Her lamb managed to be edible. By then she wasn’t saying much. She had sunk down into herself far below the frequency of conversation. Tim took charge of the ordeal by summoning his resources as a former Troyer partner and bored his two guests all night with stories of famous cases. They listened politely while sipping their wine. When the monologue was over, they left.

5

He left Peter and Masserly and returned to his office. The motion for summary judgment in the Keibler case was still warm from the printer. He sat down behind his desk and opened the bottom drawer and filed the motion away just as he had planned to do. He tried to recapture the purer impulse that had prompted him to write it and the nourishment the writing itself had offered him during the long and lonely weekend. But now only the sad diminishment of the final product’s destiny meant anything to him. Into the drawer, what a waste. Peter and Masserly together couldn’t formulate half as cogent an argument against the plaintiffs in Keibler if they spent six months knocking their simian brows together, and he’d done it in a weekend. It pissed him off, Masserly’s sense of entitlement and Peter’s unmerited partner status.

He shut the drawer and then rested his arms on the desk and looked through the doorway, burdened and discontented. He tried to think an appropriate thought, something ennobling and proud. Staff attorneys are people, too, he thought. Then he thought, Oh, fuck that.

He took the motion with him down to Mike Kronish’s office. Empty. That was a good thing. He didn’t think he could do it if he had to hand it to Kronish in person. He set the motion on Kronish’s desk and wrote a quick note. He departed with renewed hope and a bad case of butterflies. He was halfway down the hall when