Lavender Blue Panties

Silky blue panties suddenly flying through the air and coming to rest on the court document you are reading will always grab your attention.

Lisa Gomez Alexander, a member of my wife's hospital fund-raising committee, had never said more than hello to me before she walked into my small law office unannounced that Monday afternoon. Her vocal hostility preceded her as she had peremptorily demanded that my secretary point her toward the door to my office.

"If you're not man enough for that rotten cunt of a wife, get her a chastity belt or lock her in a cage," Lisa Gomez Alexander screamed.

As I scrambled from behind my desk to close my office door, my immediate concern was the violence I was seeing in this woman's eyes. She was dangerous.

Of course, I softened my voice in an effort to ease her angst as I protested that I had no knowledge of the subject of her accusation. She fell into a chair sobbing uncontrollably.

"I found those panties in my husband's coat pocket when he came home from a hospital board meeting last night," she mumbled through her pain. "It was time to send that suit to the cleaners."

"But what makes you think my wife is involved?" I asked as fear began to make a knot in my stomach.

I am Steve Harvey and my wife is Julia, the devoted homemaker, practicing psychologist and university prof.

If I have a vice, it's devoting too much business time to cataloging Julia's breadth and scope of abilities and seemingly unlimited capacities for life. She excels in her profession while providing the leading force in our community's basic affairs. Furthermore, Julia is a formidably beautiful woman soon to remark her 40th birthday; or this would not be a story worth telling.

As Lisa Gomez Alexander recovered her composure and began relating what she knew about the sinister panties seemingly threatening us from the middle of my desk, I incongruously experienced a brief flash of awareness that Julia was the most perfect and always the most satisfying love partner any man could desire.

"I have been uncomfortable many times at parties and charity dinner-dances when Jeff and Julia seem absorbed and at times oblivious of you and me," Lisa said, her voice on a downward curve once more to a growl.

Jeff Alexander and his wife were majority owners of several TV stations along the West Coast. Of more import, moreover, they were listed in Fortune 500.

Then came the venom again. Lisa called my manhood into question and lost no steam as she disparaged my professional success and recognition as a lawyer. Inescapably, I was her choice for the assessment of blame in the affair of which I continued to be less than informed. Her demeaning lecture, however, had hit its mark.

Without a doubt, I was beginning to register my humiliation. I became fearful that she would tap into my long sealed reservoir of anger.

And yes! I'm a small town lawyer, more of a CPA, pushing 40 whose life revolves around his wife and daughters. Oh, yes! I confess that I struggle to net $75,000 a year while my wife pays taxes on more that $200,000. Again, I hasten to add that the discrepancy most certainly weighs on my consciousness.

"Mrs. Alexander," I began tentatively. "Let's attempt to withhold judgment until we know something substantial.

At the moment, I pointed out, all we had was a pair of blue panties that resembled underwear that my wife owns. My best lawyering persona was beginning to emerge.

"Now, let's be intelligent about this," I reasoned, at the risk of sounding pedantic. "What proof do you have that these panties are my wife's?"

"The stupid bitch had her name embroidered on the crotch," she answered. Lisa Gomez Alexander's eyes flared in a mixture of incredulity and naked contempt.

As I said, I'm a tax lawyer and parliamentary adviser at school board and city council meetings.

That's hardly the emotion churning cauldron that trial lawyers face daily.

Without belaboring the point, when faced with the question of my avoiding the stresses of courtroom drama, I sketch a carefully prepared though fraudulent scenario of my always having been constitutionally reluctant to engage in any form of confrontation.

Carefully conditioned restraint, achieved with professional guidance after a brutal incident in high school, had rendered me almost physically defenseless. But there are limits, and those long practiced behavioral harnesses can break if stressed beyond tested norms.

I live with a subcurrent of apprehension.

"See for yourself," Lisa Gomez Alexander cried as she jerked the panties from the desk.

There, in an exaggeration of offense, on the gusset was emblazoned in red stitching, "JAH."

Knowing that I cannot afford to "get mad" does not mean that I cannot irrationally "get mad"! When I began to tremble involuntarily, my mind began to gauge emotions that I had hoped would never again be a problem. As a reached for the thin material to examine the crotch, I suddenly withdrew my hand without touching the garment.

"I wish the earth would open up a pit of fire and brimstone and swallow all of you slimy bastards," Lisa Gomez Alexander hissed as she arose from the chair and spat a stream of saliva across the desk.

Leaving the panties on my desk, Lisa Gomez Alexander walked wearily toward my office door. Before she departed, she turned and tearfully asked me to call her after I had considered the evidence and investigated further. I could only nod, and she slowly left my office.

I sat in my desk chair staring out the window until the blue of evening began to shroud our mountains. Then I flipped open my cell phone.

Jenkins answered immediately. Jenks had taught Medieval and Renaissance History until the recent change in administration at the university. He and Julia had been faculty colleagues almost as long as Julia and I had been married. After 22 years, he was witnessing the academic disconnect from Europe and Western Civilization. The new president was dropping his courses, offering him an unpalatable diet of freshman and sophomore survey courses.

Fortunately, Jenks had always been a gunsmith and gun shop owner, and he would suffer no loss in quality of life. But he had become a dear friend to me and my family. Julie particularly benefited from his circumspect analysis of the bitter faculty politics. Jenks had on occasion had prevented Julie from injuriously overreacting or acting prematurely.

I had felt his anguish as a friend and valued client.

Now I needed more than a friendly ear. His ever present ebullience, however, was like a sedative.

"Hey! I was just tasting a new batch of home brew," he crowed. "Come by on your way home and I'll send some of the poison for Julie to sample."

"Jenks? Do you still have that Glock you offered Bill for $400?" I asked, my voice strange without inflection.

End of CH. One.

TO BE CONTINUED