Free A Private Sorcery by Lisa Gornick Page B

Basically marijuana, some hallucinogens. He’d dropped out of Stanford and was working for a moving company, smoking pot every day with the guys on the truck. Then he got busted with some marijuana he’d brought down to the city from Mendocino. His mother was devastated. He’d been her golden child. Star athlete, president of the student council, the most popular girls for his girlfriends. His father got the charges dropped in exchange for his going to a drug clinic.”
    She sees Leonard’s consternation. Despite Klara, Leonard had managed to bump along through his boys’ teenage years with Marc a beerguzzling frat boy and Saul never even touching coffee.
    â€œBy the time I met Reed, he was on a macrobiotic diet. He drank wheat grass juice and ate mostly Japanese food. His friends called him Seaweed. That’s why it was so hard for me, at first, to believe he’d gotten back into drugs.”
    Leonard holds the picture close to his face. “Why did he come to New York?”
    â€œTo finish college. His parents hated New York, but Columbia was the only place he’d go. It was the same year I started Yale. He was the only person I knew from California, and I sort of clung to him. I’d come down on weekends, and he’d take me around.”
    She knows Leonard must be thinking that Reed was a boyfriend. That it would be hard for Leonard, knowing her now, to imagine how Reed, with his exotic girlfriends and ease everywhere, had seemed back then out of her league.
    â€œAfter he graduated, he bought a van he drove to Peru. We lost touch. It was just luck”—she pauses on this word—“bumping into him that day at the Whitney. He’d gone to law school and got a job working for a top firm. He hated it, said it was like hazing, seventy hours a week working on some glitch involving the intersection of American and French tax law.”
    Leonard hands the photo back to Rena. She can see on his face that he’s wondering if she’s holding something back. If so, it’s more about Saul than Reed: how, to Saul, Reed had seemed like a benign version of Marc. A breath of fresh air in the claustrophobia of medicine, someone who didn’t regard Hispanics as poor people who are more inconvenient than other poor people because they don’t speak English and have their own healing practices. As for her relationship with Reed, Saul had commented on it only once. It saddened him, he said, that Reed, not he, had known her as a girl— as a girl , Saul’s euphemism for when her life was scrappy and sordid, every corner filled with shame.
    M ORTON GIVES HER the lowdown he’s heard from the lawyer for Reed’s girlfriend, Bria, a twenty-three-year-old Brazilian divorcée with platinum hair and a Spanish passport that lists her address as her family’s compound in the Tenerife district of the Canary Islands: that Reed quit his job in lieu of being fired, that he’d been doing what Morton called “some private work for a Eurotrash crowd.”
    Bria, Morton says, is the one who was busted at Kennedy three days before Saul’s arrest. “Dumb,” Morton says over the phone. “Telling the customs agent the stuffed panda she was carrying was a Valentine’s Day present for her mother. Too cute. The agents get suspicious with cute. Especially the female ones.”
    What the agent on the four-to-twelve shift saw before her was a girl with white hair dark at the roots, an armful of silver bracelets and a purple suede jacket. Her nostrils looked raw. Slitting the lining of the Louis Vuitton suitcases, the agent found a pharmacy of pills.
    â€œThat, too, the Vuitton, was dumb. The sharp smugglers know you’re better off with Amelia Earhart.”
    With her one phone call, Bria called her lawyer—Reed. When no lawyer arrived, the Treasury guys realized the call had been a tip-off. By then, Reed was on a plane from Hartford to