The Body in Question: A Novel - Hardcover

Ciment, Jill

 
9781524747985: The Body in Question: A Novel
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 152474798X ISBN 13: 9781524747985
Verlag: Pantheon, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

*** NEW YORK TIMES 100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF THE YEAR ***

From the author of Heroic Measures (“Smart and funny and completely surprising . . . I loved every page” —Ann Patchett), Act of God (“A feat of literary magic”—Booklist) and, with Amy Hempel, The Hand That Feeds You (“An unnerving, elegant page-turner” —Vanity Fair), a spare, masterful novel.

The place: central Florida. The situation: a sensational murder trial, set in a courthouse more Soviet than Le Corbusier; a rich, white teenage girl—a twin—on trial for murdering her toddler brother.

Two of the jurors: Hannah, a married fifty-two-year-old former Rolling Stone and Interview Magazine photographer of rock stars and socialites (she began to photograph animals when she realized she saw people “as a species”), and Graham, a forty-one-year-old anatomy professor. Both are sequestered (she, juror C-2; he, F-17) along with the other jurors at the Econo Lodge off I-75. As the shocking and numbing details of the crime are revealed during a string of days and courtroom hours, and the nights play out in a series of court-financed meals at Outback Steak House (the state isn’t paying for their drinks) and Red Lobster, Hannah and Graham fall into a furtive affair, keeping their oath as jurors never to discuss the trial. During deliberations the lovers learn that they are on opposing sides of the case. Suddenly they look at one another through an altogether different lens, as things become more complicated . . .

After the verdict, Hannah returns home to her much older husband, but the case ignites once again and Hannah’s “one last dalliance before she is too old” takes on profoundly personal and moral consequences as The Body in Question moves to its affecting, powerful, and surprising conclusion.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

JILL CIMENT was born in Montreal, Canada. She has received many grants and awards, among them a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, two New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships, the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, and a Guggenheim fellowship. A professor at the University of Florida, she lives in Gainesville, Florida, and Brooklyn, New York.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Excerpted from Part One


"When that door opens, sign out. Say you’re taking a ciga­rette break,” he says.

“I don’t smoke,” she says.

“You don’t have to smoke, just sign out. If they call your number, ignore them.”

Neither notices the door open.

“A friend of mine got out just by saying he couldn’t sit under the words ‘In God We Trust,’ ” she says.

Her number is called, C-2.

“You have another angle?” she asks.

“If one of the lawyers asks if you’ve ever been involved with an attorney, tell him he picked you up in a bar five years ago.”

“You’re assuming the lawyer will be a man,” she says.

“Tell her she picked you up in a Lowe’s five years ago. She had the power sander, you had the tool belt.”

The second time her number is called, she rises reluctantly.

“Hey,” he calls after her as she makes her way between the uneven rows of folding chairs. “Good luck.”

C-2 is surprised to find the courtroom already in session. Everyone but the defendant, a girl in her late teens, looks up as C-2 takes the only empty chair in the jury box. The other five chairs are occupied by women of varying ages. Three sport flip-flops. One is dressed as if for a hot date. One wears church clothes.

The judge, an older African American woman with a no-nonsense haircut, asks the defendant to turn around in her chair and face the prospective jurors. The defendant’s head revolves so slowly that C-2 can’t discern whether the sluggishness is deliberate, to arrest the court’s attention, or if the teenager in the ill-fitting but very expensive clothes has something physically or mentally wrong with her. Her most striking feature is her hair: the bottom six inches are dyed shoe-polish black, the top six inches are Barbie blond.

C-2 has studied her share of faces. She started her career as a por­trait photographer for Rolling Stone and Interview magazine until it finally sank in: she wasn’t interested in people. As individuals. She was interested in them as a species.

The defendant’s features are the kind found in how-to-draw books—sketchy and basic. If C-2 were to close her eyes, she doubts she would remember what is inside the blank oval a second later.

If C-2 had to wager a guess as to the teenager’s crime, she would bet shoplifting, or selling her grandmother’s Percocets to her class­mates, or both. A one- or two-day trial at most.

The judge asks, “Do any of you recognize the defendant?”

Two hands shoot up.

“I saw her on TV,” says one of the flip-flop set.

“On Court TV,” says the woman who has removed her lip and nose rings out of respect for court.

The defendant’s counsel, a full-figured woman in her early thir­ties, and the jury consultant, a gray-haired gentleman in Armani, confer: the two women are dismissed. Two more potential jurors enter the court and take the vacated chairs: a woman who looks pregnant but is too old to be pregnant, and the young man with whom C-2 had been mildly flirting in the holding area—in his early forties, whereas C-2 is fifty-two—the one who had all the clever answers on how to get out of jury duty. He catches her attention and shrugs self-mockingly. His eyes are a blue that seems too crys­talline to belong to his face, which is pitted with acne scars. Other than the church lady, he is the only one dressed appropriately for court; khakis, white shirt, closed shoes. C-2 is wearing cutoffs and a T-shirt. It is 95 degrees outside.

“This is a murder trial,” the judge says.

The defendant slides her eyes sideways in her expressionless face. C-2 follows the stare. It lands on a middle-aged woman seated in the front row of the gallery, her face an illustration of anguish. A blond replica of the defendant comforts the woman, but this version is prettier. Her face is vibrant, as if each feature were an individual puppet and she were the puppet master. If C-2 closed her eyes, she would remember that face.

“The trial may take up to three weeks,” the judge explains, “and may involve sequestration. Is there anyone who believes themselves incapable of fulfilling such an obligation?”

C-2’s standby excuse, that she couldn’t sit under “In God We Trust,” seems flippant, almost reprehensible to use given that the middle-aged woman is shuddering and imploding in the gallery. C-2 could tell the judge that her husband is eighty-six, the truth, and that she is his sole caretaker, her fear.

The woman too old to be pregnant and the man with the lucent blue eyes raise their hands.

“F-17,” the man introduces himself to the judge. “I’m a professor at the medical school. My Gross Anatomy course begins next week. I have twenty-one cadavers waiting for me.”

“Aren’t they already dead?” the judge asks.

Again that self-mocking shrug. “Yes,” he says.

“They can wait.”

The woman’s hand is still up. “J-12. I’m going in for tests next week,” she says.

The judge waits a beat for anyone else to speak up.

C-2 could still raise her hand. Though her husband retains his impressive, curious mind, he loses things daily—keys, words, height, mass, the ability to hear conversations, his peripheral vision (though he insists on still driving), the subtlety of taste, and the assault of smell. And most alarming, the loss of the sixth sense, proprioception, the ability to know the position of one’s body parts. Her husband isn’t always sure where his hands and feet are without having to look for them. It takes him a wooden moment to reach for things, to make those measurements one unconsciously calculates each time one dips under a low beam, or eats popcorn in the dark. He can still navigate the day’s obstacles, but for how much longer? C-2 is becoming his copilot. Her senses must work double-time shepherding two separate bodies through space, but to refuse the job—not to point out the broken step, not to repeat the punch line he couldn’t hear—will mean abandoning him in the woolly, dim, mute isolation of old age.

She met her husband when she was twenty-four and he was fifty-seven. He was a Pulitzer-winning journalist and she had just given up portraiture for something more dangerous. He had asked her to be his photographer on an assignment in El Salvador—civil war had broken out yet again. He had flown first-class, and she had flown economy. Not once during the seven-hour flight did he venture back into steerage to see how she was faring. That had cinched it for her: her attraction for him was an unreciprocated crush; he had only been interested in her photography.

At the San Salvador airport, they hitched a prearranged ride in a bus chartered by Hollywood’s radical chic, a director of conspiracy thrillers, an earnest actress, and her producer husband. The actress had come to interview the charming mustachioed general of the rebels. The van had to cross the mountains before nightfall and curfew. The road was a stretch of graveled ascent, bracketed with makeshift checkpoints manned by ragged boys with rifles.

The producer broke out a bottle of Valium and handed the pills around. C-2 noted that the war correspondent didn’t take one, so she didn’t either, even though she wanted one very badly.

She could tell she had passed some sort of test with him, and that having passed...

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Verlag
Pantheon
Erscheinungsdatum
2019
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
152474798X
ISBN 13 
9781524747985
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
192
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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