Free Compass Rose by John Casey Page B

owe Jack. He tell you I worked for him? I’m not the kind of guy Jack usually hires for his firm. I didn’t make partner, but I learned a lot in five years. Now I run my own shop—an office in Woonsocket and one in Providence. Run-of-the-mill cases, but I’m seeing more people.”
    “So, being a governor’s aide—how does that fit in?”
    “I’m not ruling out doing something in politics.”
    “ ‘I’m not ruling out’—that usually means someone’s dead set on it. I hope you don’t imagine Miss Perry’s a moneybags who’ll bankroll your campaign.”
    He smiled. “You look a lot like your sister, but you talk a whole lot different.”
    Elsie felt both flattered and stopped. He sat there smiling pleasantly. She wondered if he was really so at ease. She wasn’t used to being the one who wondered. She wondered if he was at ease because there she was in her uniform, a state employee, and he was a big cheese. She said, “So, if you get stopped for speeding, you let the cop know you work for the governor? Is there some little something on your license plate?” She held up her hand and said, “Never mind. I don’t know why …” She gave up the idea of playing her little trump card—trout, fire, wine. She felt her edge grow dull. She’d relied on that edge for years. When she was at Sally and Jack’s she was the daring gadfly. In the woods she had her badge. And although she’d worked at being just-folks, one of the guys, she had to admit she’d never quite given up the privileges of class. She’d denounced them when she saw them in someone else, most usually in Jack. She sometimes thought that her life had leached them out of her. She sometimes thought that the whole idea of class was fading, the radioactive emissions were weaker and weaker. Nothing like the Boston or Newport of a hundred or fifty years ago. But deep inside her, sometimes hidden even from herself, there was a trace. One of the chief privileges was the assurance of being the final judge of all other claims of worth—money, power, beauty, fame, intellect, or even good works. She’d used it—it wasn’t just her sassy talk or body that set men off. Her college English prof had imagined he was fucking Daisy Buchanan. The striving lawyers at Jack and Sally’s parties,not quite as literate, still sensed an allure of risk. When they were through she might turn on them, remind them that sex was pleasant enough but now that she was herself again she could see they weren’t quite the thing.
    And now—as if her bursting into tears in front of this bearish man was as physically intimate as fucking—she’d felt the old urge to put him in his place. And she’d started—“I hope you don’t imagine Miss Perry’s a moneybags …” The breezy way she mentioned money, the poke at his ambition from her position above ambition, the backward tilt of her head as if she’d finally bothered to pay attention. (One of the minor privileges—no one was really there—of course there were always people around, but no one was really there until you decided to notice.)
    She didn’t have it in her anymore. She hadn’t debated it, hadn’t examined her conscience. In fact, she’d been about to make another entrance in that role. Performance canceled.
    She hadn’t crossed the Queens River because she’d looked like the Pillsbury Doughboy. With all her Exercycling and her fish-and-vegetables diet she was on better terms with her body—she didn’t mind that her feet were a half size bigger, her hip bones a bit wider, and of course her breasts bigger.
    He was staring into the fire. Without looking up he said, “No, it’s okay. I ask myself that. I’m as suspicious of my ambition as I am of anybody else’s. I won’t give you the speech about caring what happens to people. But is there a part that wants the applause? The deference? The special treatment?” He shrugged. “I can’t say there isn’t some of that. But so long as it stays in the