there.
I am a long-time practitioner before the federal appeals courts, arguing mostly large, complicated negligence cases in which the appellant is a hotel or a restaurant chain engaged in interstate commerce, and who has been successfully sued by an employee or a victim of what is often some often terrible mishap. Mostly I win my cases. Sallie is also a lawyer, but did not like the practice. She works as a resource specialist, which means fund-raising for by and large progressive causes: the homeless, women at risk in the home, children at risk in the home, nutrition issues, etc. It is a far cry from the rich, arriviste-establishment views of her family in Alabama. I am from Vicksburg, Mississippi, from a very ordinary although solid suburban upbringing. My father was an insurance-company attorney. Sallie and I met in law school at Yale, in the seventies. We have always thought of ourselves as lucky in life, and yet in no way extraordinary in our goals or accomplishments. We are simply the southerners from sturdy, supportive families who had the good fortune to get educated well and who came back more or less to home, ready to fit in. Somebody has to act on that basic human impulse, we thought, or else there’s no solid foundation of livable life.
One day after the old millennium’s end and the new one’s beginning, Sallie said to me—this was at lunch at Le Perigord on Esplanade, our favorite place: “Do you happen to remember”—she’d been thinking about it—“that first little watercolor we bought, in Old Saybrook? The tilted sailboat sail you could barely recognize in all the white sky. At that little shop near the bridge?” Of course I remembered it. It’s in my law office in Place St. Charles, a cherished relic of youth.
“What about it?” We were at a table in the shaded garden of the restaurant where it smelled sweet from some kindof heliotrope. Tiny wild parrots were fluttering up in the live-oak foliage and chittering away. We were eating a cold crab soup.
“Well,” she said. Sallie has pale, almost animal blue eyes and translucently caramel northern European skin. She has kept away from the sun for years. Her hair is cut roughly and parted in the middle like some Bergman character from the sixties. She is forty-seven and extremely beautiful. “It’s completely trivial,” she went on, “but how did we ever know back then that we had any taste. I don’t really even care about it, you know that. You have much better taste than I do in most things. But why were we sure we wouldn’t choose that little painting and then have it be horrible? Explain that to me. And what if our friends had seen it and laughed about us behind our backs? Do you ever think that way?”
“No,” I said, my spoon above my soup, “I don’t.”
“You mean it isn’t interesting? Or, eventually we’d have figured out better taste all by ourselves?”
“Something like both,” I said. “It doesn’t matter. Our taste is fine and would’ve been fine. I still have that little boat in my office. People pass through and admire it all the time.”
She smiled in an inwardly pleased way. “Our friends aren’t the point, of course. If we’d liked sad-clown paintings or put antimacassars on our furniture, I wonder if we’d have a different, worse life now,” she said. She stared down at her lined-up knife and spoons. “It just intrigues me. Life’s so fragile in the way we experience it.”
“What’s the point?” I had to return to work soon. We have few friends now in any case. It’s natural.
She furrowed her brow and scratched the back of her head using her index finger. “It’s about how altering one small part changes everything.”
“One star strays out of line and suddenly there’s no Big Dipper?” I said. “I don’t really think you mean that. I don’t really think you’re getting anxious just because things might have gone differently in your life.” I will admit this amused
I am a long-time practitioner before the federal appeals courts, arguing mostly large, complicated negligence cases in which the appellant is a hotel or a restaurant chain engaged in interstate commerce, and who has been successfully sued by an employee or a victim of what is often some often terrible mishap. Mostly I win my cases. Sallie is also a lawyer, but did not like the practice. She works as a resource specialist, which means fund-raising for by and large progressive causes: the homeless, women at risk in the home, children at risk in the home, nutrition issues, etc. It is a far cry from the rich, arriviste-establishment views of her family in Alabama. I am from Vicksburg, Mississippi, from a very ordinary although solid suburban upbringing. My father was an insurance-company attorney. Sallie and I met in law school at Yale, in the seventies. We have always thought of ourselves as lucky in life, and yet in no way extraordinary in our goals or accomplishments. We are simply the southerners from sturdy, supportive families who had the good fortune to get educated well and who came back more or less to home, ready to fit in. Somebody has to act on that basic human impulse, we thought, or else there’s no solid foundation of livable life.
One day after the old millennium’s end and the new one’s beginning, Sallie said to me—this was at lunch at Le Perigord on Esplanade, our favorite place: “Do you happen to remember”—she’d been thinking about it—“that first little watercolor we bought, in Old Saybrook? The tilted sailboat sail you could barely recognize in all the white sky. At that little shop near the bridge?” Of course I remembered it. It’s in my law office in Place St. Charles, a cherished relic of youth.
“What about it?” We were at a table in the shaded garden of the restaurant where it smelled sweet from some kindof heliotrope. Tiny wild parrots were fluttering up in the live-oak foliage and chittering away. We were eating a cold crab soup.
“Well,” she said. Sallie has pale, almost animal blue eyes and translucently caramel northern European skin. She has kept away from the sun for years. Her hair is cut roughly and parted in the middle like some Bergman character from the sixties. She is forty-seven and extremely beautiful. “It’s completely trivial,” she went on, “but how did we ever know back then that we had any taste. I don’t really even care about it, you know that. You have much better taste than I do in most things. But why were we sure we wouldn’t choose that little painting and then have it be horrible? Explain that to me. And what if our friends had seen it and laughed about us behind our backs? Do you ever think that way?”
“No,” I said, my spoon above my soup, “I don’t.”
“You mean it isn’t interesting? Or, eventually we’d have figured out better taste all by ourselves?”
“Something like both,” I said. “It doesn’t matter. Our taste is fine and would’ve been fine. I still have that little boat in my office. People pass through and admire it all the time.”
She smiled in an inwardly pleased way. “Our friends aren’t the point, of course. If we’d liked sad-clown paintings or put antimacassars on our furniture, I wonder if we’d have a different, worse life now,” she said. She stared down at her lined-up knife and spoons. “It just intrigues me. Life’s so fragile in the way we experience it.”
“What’s the point?” I had to return to work soon. We have few friends now in any case. It’s natural.
She furrowed her brow and scratched the back of her head using her index finger. “It’s about how altering one small part changes everything.”
“One star strays out of line and suddenly there’s no Big Dipper?” I said. “I don’t really think you mean that. I don’t really think you’re getting anxious just because things might have gone differently in your life.” I will admit this amused
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