TCOT Absurd Assumption C22
Della left Perry in the den at a dead run – up the stairs and into her bedroom, where she recklessly shed her suit in the bathroom, wrapped herself in a terrycloth robe, shoved bare feet into furry slippers, and then flung herself across the huge bed to silently scream into a pillow.
After days of not touching her own phone, how ironic was it that she accidentally picked up a call just now from Perry's...girlfriend? Could you even call a woman of sixty a girlfriend? What did Perry call Robin Calhoun when he introduced her to people?
Did it matter?
Yes. It mattered.
Had she really thought tearing up a napkin and virtually forcing Perry to kiss her could hide the fact that Robin Calhoun existed and that Perry had been...with her...for over two years? This was precisely why she didn't play people games – because in order for there to be a winner, there had to be a loser and she was all too aware of how these games felt from the perspective of a loser.
She had been the loser more than once.
Although being the loser had ultimately led her to Perry and a wonderful life filled with love and laughter and adventure, she remembered the searing pain of losing and the thought of being responsible for someone else's pain filled her with self-loathing.
Sometimes winning felt like losing.
Just two short hours ago she had been acquitted of a crime prior to the noon recess by the greatest criminal attorney in the world – a new record even for Perry Mason – and her stunned mind commanded her to jump in the air, fling her arms around her attorney and kiss him, but her paralyzed body would not obey. And when he'd closed up ever so slightly, then grabbed her arm and tried to tell her something, she'd done the most trite, meaningless thing she'd ever done in her life.
"I'm fine." Pat, pat, pat on his hand. "Just fine."
How many times had she said that before, when it had been appropriate, and not like a dog trainer congratulating a poodle that had just performed a trick?
"Good dog." Pat, pat, pat. "Now run along and play."
Friends and relatives swarmed around her as Paul escorted her from the courtroom, jubilant about the acquittal, and while she was grateful for their support and belief in her, she had longed to be alone with Perry, to explore their awkward moment as the sharp echo of the gavel faded around them, and thank him properly for all he had done. When Paul again insisted upon buying just her and Perry a celebratory lunch, she could have kissed the boy for so deftly removing her from the well-meaning but overwhelming hoard of people who passed her around for hugs and kisses in the courthouse hallway. Right then she needed to be with the two important men responsible for her in-the-blink-of-an-eye acquittal. There hadn't had much to go on, not much more than Perry's belief in her and his sketchy theory, and yet, she was free.
And more confused than ever. Was she the winner or the loser?
Seated in the back of Paul's 'hippie' Jeep, waiting for Perry to join them, she kicked herself for leaving him alone at the Defendant's table. Traditionally he had allowed his clients to exit before him, in order for attention to be directed at them first and foremost, and she shouldn't have expected anything different for her acquittal; who she was, or rather, who she had been, notwithstanding. Victory celebrations were also traditional, either public or very private, depending upon how much Perry liked the particular client (and vice-versa). When it was apparent the celebration would be private, Perry sometimes escorted her through the Judge's chambers and out the back of the courthouse where he flagged down a taxi to take them to a favorite night club, or to one of their apartments. Her favorite celebrations had been those private ones beginning with a sneaky escape, and if it were still that other time she would have told Junior to scram when he asked "Well, what do we do now?" instead of announcing that they would celebrate. She would have grabbed Perry's hand, dragged him out the back way, and plastered her inappropriately yearning body against his with ravening desire.
She felt her cheeks redden and sat up to place cool palms against them. A winner's celebration.
But this wasn't that other time when their entire world revolved around each other and the practice, and she wasn't by any stretch of the imagination a blushing ingénue. No, this was a time of myriad complications: of covert glances, heart-stirring kisses, confusing conversations, and conflicting behavior between two people on the verge of being termed elderly. Perry still cared for her – otherwise why would he have stepped down from the bench to defend her? – but just when she thought they were about to make mincemeat of that damned contract article by article and get to the heart of what he had done to them and why, something interfered. It was comical, really, how many interruptions they had endured since his return, how many conversations they had abandoned to answer the telephone or the door; how many potentially sticky situations either he or she had consciously withdrawn from to protect the walls each had built around what she had done to them.
Tears slipped down her burning cheeks, and onto the counterpane. A loser's lament.
She had undeniably been the one to ruin them, no matter how much she tried to blame Perry for agreeing to serve out Harvey's term without consulting her. He couldn't be blamed for accepting the Governor's plea to remain on the bench and run for re-election once Harvey's original term expired, because he had done so only after being introduced to poor Bryce Hummel, which she had done only after being introduced, after a fashion, to Max and Laura Parrish, and their daughter. Perry hadn't expected to win retention, and had in fact submitted his name at the eleventh hour and refused to participate in any campaigning. His reputation and notoriety, however, had resulted in a landslide of votes in the retention election, and the five remaining years of Harvey's term she'd agreed to endure stretched to eight, and would have reached seventeen had Ken Braddock not hired Bobby Lynch to kill Arthur Gordon and frame her for the murder.
That something so inexplicable could in the long run bring her happiness was the ultimate bad joke.
For every winner there was a loser. And sometimes the winner was the true loser.
What she had done three years ago had been intended to give Perry a reason not to seek retention to the Court, to instead allow him the freedom to accept a personal life he'd hidden since coming home from that lecture series in Washington DC she'd forced him to participate in. The 'normal' life she couldn't give him even though she loved him more than she loved herself; the 'normal' life she denied him every time she refused to marry him.
But Perry, the scoundrel, didn't do anything to make that 'normal' life a reality and she grew more and more frustrated with him until that frustration obscured every memory of their spectacular life together. Then Perry grew frustrated with her and the civility and stoic resignation with which he initially accepted the end of their relationship vanished after two weeks when he began drinking and calling her in the middle of the night, incoherent in his despondency over her willingness to act like their feelings for one another could be so easily called history. The conversations were horrible, far worse than the conversation in 1967 that had led to what she told Asher was an extenuating circumstance at the core of her decision fifteen years later to point him in the direction of 'normalcy'…and push.
A major element of that push was an innocent and unsuspecting Bryce Hummel, whom Della shamefully used as a shield against Perry's suffering, as well as her own. Even though her relationship with Bryce ended after only seven emotionally intense weeks, she stalwartly assured Perry well beyond that timeframe that she had what she wanted and he should go get what he'd always wanted. It was far from the truth, and it took more resolve than she thought she possessed in regard to Perry not to break down and admit what was truly behind her decision to end their relationship, which she irrationally felt his brilliant mind should have figured out anyway, for he must have known what was going on between his good friends Max and Laura.
Perry's late-night phone calls lessened in frequency as their separation ticked by in long, lonely days, eventually becoming convivial and even welcome, as the horribleness of those first few weeks was forgiven and remarkably, largely forgotten, or at least not talked about. They met a few times after four months of separation, as Perry's reliance on alcohol waned, but only in restaurants and night clubs where their conversations couldn't get too involved, and where one night Della insisted that each dictate rules to a sympathetic bar tender who dutifully wrote them down on a series of cocktail napkins, in triplicate. Rules they must abide by in order to salvage the friendship that had been the foundation of their romance, because seeing each other again had made it plain that neither of them could conceive of life without some form of contact between them, no matter how slight or shallow or painful.
The contract sounded like a good idea…until the alcohol wore off.
Then Della returned to her big, empty house with too many walls permeated with Perry's presence and cried non-stop for twelve hours while the man himself returned to San Francisco and slept with Robin Calhoun for the first time. He'd admitted it to Mae Kirby who in turn mentioned it to her niece one day in the middle of relating a recent trip to the Australian Outback. The news was bittersweet to Della, and she wasn't sure if she should be furious with him or with herself at the disappointing turn of events, not to mention the even more disappointing pettiness displayed by Perry when he dragged her aunt into the fray. He could finally have what he'd been asking her for since before they'd ever said 'I love you' to one another, and instead of recognizing that and acting on it, he'd 'taken up', as Aunt Mae announced, with Robin 'Bird' Calhoun, a fading television actress who owned the apartment building in which he lived and whose baggage included four marriages, three children, and seven grandchildren.
Della consoled herself with the fact that Perry would have some semblance of a family with Robin Calhoun, but it galled her that her sacrifice had gone so horribly awry because she'd led Perry to water – and he'd taken a drink from the wrong damn trough.
In winning, she had lost.
When a year went by, and then another six months, and when the thing she had based her decision on didn't happen, Della didn't know what to think. So she didn't think. She didn't think for a long time.
Asher Langlois entered her life then, at the lowest low, and the attraction she felt for him had been immensely surprising. His job kept him on the road for weeks at a time, and his actual home was in Pennsylvania, so their relationship consisted primarily of long-distance telephone calls, and the occasional clandestine weekend in whatever state he might be plying his talents for whichever grass roots organization had contracted him. Asher's temperament was low-key and respectful, so when Della had first seen him in action at an event he organized opposing a Gordon Foundation project, she was taken aback. One moment he could be at a podium delivering a compelling condemnation of whatever organization opposed the organization that was paying him, and the next moment he could be whispering the sweetest, silliest compliments into her ear.
Arthur Gordon had made it clear he disliked Asher Langlois, precisely because he had been hired by an ecological concern to block a large Gordon Foundation project to revitalize abandoned gold mines and Della was essentially consorting with the enemy. Still smarting from her resistance to his ill-fated advance, Arthur grudgingly tolerated Della's involvement with Asher because the man made her smile again, and he had missed that smile from his Executive Assistant.
Della tried extremely hard to fall in love with Asher. He was conventional and old-fashioned despite the progressive causes he gave such impassioned speeches for, and he made it clear that their casual, open-ended relationship wasn't enough for him. In his world, if you slept with someone, you married them. In Della's world, it meant nothing of the sort, as scandalous as that might be. Their unconventional, contemporary relationship was ideal for her after the intense amount of time she'd spent with Perry, and she was reminded of a similar relationship she had been content to keep at status quo until that man had also shocked her with a diamond ring and wondered how she could have misread both men so badly…and they her.
Asher worked hard and constantly, moving from cause to cause and state-to-state every few weeks, depending upon the complexity of the project at hand. His primary focus was to establish a firm foundation for whatever organization hired him, to stir up publicity and generate momentum to carry the cause to its zenith. He was the lobbyist, the figurehead, the dynamo behind whom troops rallied until a local general schooled by Asher moved up through the ranks to take over. Not as tremendous a public speaker as Perry, Asher relied primarily on a heavily practiced style and rapid-fire talking points than on depth of knowledge or a true passion for the subject, but he got the job done and was paid handsomely for it. In personal conversations, Asher was reserved and sincere, and very much like Perry in that he rarely said anything he didn't mean directly to a person. Asher was also very much unlike Perry in that he never quite could manage to say just the right thing.
Knowing all of that about Asher, Della had cried the first time the word 'love' popped up in conversation, and it was weeks later she realized Asher had taken her tears as a positive sign in regard to the truth of her feelings for him. The relationship had appealed to her specifically because she could easily balance their limited time together against her tenuous friendship with Perry, and her demanding job, but it wasn't enough for Asher who had gotten down on one knee, offered marriage, a promise to retire from his own demanding job, and the specter of a settled life.
What Asher didn't know, because she had never spoken about her life with Perry, was that she had been living a settled life, and she hated it, an emotive reaction and word she'd never considered lightly. Flying to meet him in Oregon or New York or even Indiana for pity's sake, added a bit of excitement that had been missing from her life, and their time together was enjoyable, because she was truly and deeply fond of him. Not being in love with him made turning down Asher's proposal easier than turning down any one of Perry's dozens of proposals, but it broke her heart just the same.
She was still dealing with that broken heart two weeks later when Arthur Gordon was murdered. Calling Perry had been a measure of her desperation, her utter loneliness, her need to hear his voice and pretend he still cared for her in the wake of losing yet another important person in her life. And miraculously, he had done the one thing that would ease her desperation, banish her loneliness, and prove he still cared for her. It was unexpected, intoxicating, and smacked of high drama and grand-standing. In other words: vintage Perry Mason.
Della slid off the bed, and went to stand by the window on the opposite wall overlooking the back yard. In the days since her arrest she hadn't ventured into her own yard, once her pride and joy, and the plants were untended and desperate for water, fading quickly into the cooler evening weather. The garden had been her sanctuary, her escape from the aching loneliness she had purposely brought into her life, but now she could barely stand to look at it. The beauty she had cultivated mocked her with its transiency and she wondered why she had ever thought that anything, including a part-time cat and especially flowers, could take the place of loving and being loved.
She felt his presence again before she heard him, so light on his feet for a big, tall man, his dynamic energy filling the space that surrounded him. He stood in the doorway watching her, no doubt with hands in pockets, feet planted apart, eyes hooded and brooding.
"What did Robin want?"
"To congratulate me."
Is that really all, Perry? "That was nice of her."
"Yes, it was." He didn't expound on the call, or say that Robin wished her all the best, because right now Robin probably wished her all kinds of hell, and Della was intuitive enough to know that, no matter what he might claim she said. "You know, you should look happier when your attorney is around. It makes him feel like all his hard work is appreciated."
"All your hard work is appreciated. I should have thanked you sooner." At least before your...girlfriend...called.
"All the thank you I need is to see my clients happy."
Della leaned her head against the smooth, cool glass of the window. "That's all you've ever wanted, all you've ever expected, isn't it?"
"That's all I'll ever want."
They weren't talking about just any client. And they weren't talking about just her acquittal.
She closed her eyes, but not before several tears slid down her cheeks. "Seeing you at the jail…that made me happier than I've been in a long time. I needed you, but I was afraid to ask you to…I – I really thought you'd send Frank Heartwell. I thought what I'd done to us – I thought you would stay away to make me happy."
"Did my staying away the past three years make you happy, Della?"
She shook her head slowly, rolling it back and forth across the glass, trying to remember when she had felt so miserable. Possibly her entire life depended on what the phone call from Robin Calhoun was all about and what she said to him from this point forward and it scared her. "No. I tried to be happy…but I hurt too many people while trying."
"That makes two of us."
Della took a moment to absorb his reply and to gather her wits to form a question, one of the hundred questions she should have asked him three years ago. "Were you happy with me, Perry? Truly happy? Forever after happy?" Happier than you've been with Robin Calhoun?
"Yes." Simple was still best.
If he asked her the same question right now, her answer would require color-coded note cards, several relief breaks, and an entire box of tissues because to her their relationship had been so very, very complicated. She had accused him of over-simplifying their relationship from the beginning, yet his one word answer carried more wisdom and eloquence than any poem or proverb known to man, because it was the truth; his truth, the plain, simple axiom of his life. It stole her breath with its purity.
He had been happy, and then he hadn't been happy.
She had been responsible for both his happiness and his unhappiness.
And if she had asked that elementary question before deciding that she couldn't possibly make him as happy as he deserved, neither of them would have ever been unhappy. What could she possibly say that would equal the potency of that single word? "So was I."
"Will you finally tell me why you thought I wasn't?"
"I can't," she whispered. "I've hurt you so much already."
"Whatever it was hurt you more, Della. I should have figured it out sooner. How about I skip right to guess number three and say it was Laura Parrish? That dinner with Max when he first moved to LA – when Laura called the office looking for him?" And you gladly took the call from a friend of mine, didn't you, baby? And tried to have a nice conversation with her because she was my friend.
Della sniffed and nodded.
His arms slid around her and drew her gently against him, his lips nuzzling the delicate skin behind her ear. It was inexcusable that he hadn't put the pieces together before now, that it had taken clues from a dementia patient to bring the past three years into focus. Laura had dropped a hint about having spoken to his 'delightful secretary' when she'd shown up at his apartment after hearing about the end of his relationship with Della from Max, but he'd been too distraught to pick up on it or Laura's other hints about more troubles between her and Max. If he had listened, if he had realized…well, it was no use kicking himself now, three years later.
"What did Laura tell you?"
Tears again slid down her cheeks, remembering that telephone call from Laura Parrish the night Perry met Max Parrish for dinner to discuss 'lots of things'. "Oh, lots of things," Della said very deliberately and felt Perry stiffen slightly. "She began with how she hadn't wanted to have children, but once she knew her daughter was on the way, being a mother became the most important thing in the world to her. She said that her pregnancy had brought her and the baby's father closer together than they had ever been and that her daughter adored her father, even though her father was a busy man and couldn't spend as much time with her as he'd like."
"What else did she tell you?"
Although she was warm and safe in his embrace, Della began to shiver. "She mentioned when her daughter was born in relation to the weekend you returned from Washington DC. It was really quite deft the way she worked the dates into the conversation. And the way she managed to let me know how nicely your bachelor apartment was decorated. So masculine – so very much like the man who lived there."
His arms tightened around her as the shivering transitioned to outright trembling. "Anything else?"
"I could hear her daughter whining about not being able to go to a party in the background, interrupting, and Laura finally lost her temper. She called the girl by her full name when she scolded her."
Perry swayed slightly, rocking her gently, dreading what Della was about to tell him, distraught from what she had already told him. "I see."
"When I commented on her daughter's name, Laura told me you had been very specific about what the girl's middle name should be."
"Laura asked my opinion. I gave it. That's all there was to it."
The tears were flowing freely now as the memory of her conversation with Laura Parrish three years ago reached out and tore her heart from her chest once again. "How could you, Perry? I could have accepted knowing who it was you slept with, but how could you name your daughter Kaitlynn Mae?"