The University of Texas at Austin

Law in Popular Culture collection

Legal Studies Forum
Volume 25, Number 1 & 2  (2001)
reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum

WHO COULD STAY THE LONGEST?

LOWELL B. KOMIE

HE HAD COME TO LONDON because he knew he had AIDS and was dying and he wanted to see London one more time. Also, he had a plan. He was forty-three and had practiced law in Chicago for twenty years, at first for eight years with a large, distinguished, old-line firm of over 200 lawyers. Then, when he failed to make partner, he gradually slipped down into smaller firms, each one not quite as prominent as its predecessor, each job of less responsibility and smaller money. He never openly admitted his homosexuality at any of the firms, but it seemed that eventually he would be outed by whispering campaigns and innuendo and would be forced to resign. There was never a direct confrontation. He avoided confrontation. He always complied and left quietly. He always wore his mask of a straight conservative lawyer, immaculately dressed in his black suits or gray pinstripes, with brightly patterned silk ties and English shoes. He was a very handsome man, with clear, innocent blue eyes and English/Irish features, a snub nose, broad cheekbones with high color, and brown hair always perfectly trimmed. In a glance, Derek Haughton was a gentleman. He could have been a model in the La Salle Street windows of Brooks Brothers. His voice and manner were quiet and refined. He never argued, never raised his voice, he was always deferential, correct, politic. He’d taken his law degree at Illinois and the few straight friends he socialized with were his law classmates from those days, but gradually he walked away even from them. He lived alone and his gay life was conducted secretly, so that for the first fifteen years of his practice few people knew that he was homosexual. He was a trust lawyer and a tough probate litigator and he was very good. But he had no clients of his own. His life was too private to permit clients to intrude. He never had the desire or the ability to build networks within the bar or the banking and trust community that would bring him business. Instead, he began to spend all his spare time traveling and meeting other gay men in London, Paris or Rome, Buenos Aires or even Tokyo. He had though never in all the years really fallen in love. Not until he met Jack Norton, a young law student from John Marshall at an estate tax seminar in Chicago. Jack had been a student host at the law school seminar and Derek had asked him for assistance in finding the library for the lecture. Jack was a handsome, young blonde man in his early twenties, thin and tall and very gracious and welcoming in his blue blazer and gray flannel trousers. There had been an immediate mutual attraction. 
     They accidentally met again after the seminar that evening in a restaurant down the street where they both had stopped for wine and pizza. Jack was with a group of his law school friends and invited Derek to join them. That evening was the beginning of a relationship that had 

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now lasted five years. Suddenly though, two years ago, Derek became infected with AIDS. Why, or how, he didn’t really know. It wasn’t from Jack. The “why” part could probably be answered, and why fool himself, the “how” part could also be answered. Even though he openly lived with Jack in Derek’s apartment in Old Town, Derek early in their relationship began secretly to go to gay bars and baths and had unprotected sex. He no longer flew to cities abroad to meet discreet partners. It was as if he was lost in the frenzied rhythm of a death wish. He had no control over this secret, mysterious, animal part of him that couldn’t be sated in a monogamous relationship. Intellectually he knew it was wrong, but physically he couldn’t stop himself. So, on and on he went with partner after partner, still always the gray-clad, pinstriped, quiet, autocratic lawyer. But secretly, this inner rage drove him, leading him into these relationships that now would destroy him. He always protected Jack though, and had safe sex with his young lover. Derek’s absent overnights were never discussed. Derek paid Jack’s tuition over and above grants and loans and paid the apartment rent and all their living expenses. It was their contract. He would care for Jack and if Derek needed care someday, Jack would care for him. Ex Contractu.
     Unfortunately, neither the illness nor his law firm would wait for Derek. The disease had progressed beyond cure and he stopped trying to combat it. He became thinner and weaker, his face grew gaunt. He was obviously very ill and he had lesions on his chest. His latest firm suddenly terminated him with a payment of only one month’s salary. He wasn’t performing, getting to the office later and later, missing days of work, failing to complete projects. His illness was never discussed. Only his work was discussed and he was judged deficient. He signed a release. They gave him a check. That was a year ago. In three months he was broke. He never had savings, not even to continue his health insurance. He was not only financially broke, his spirit was broken. He surrendered the black Porsche he’d leased because he couldn’t make the lease payments. He thought of suing the firm but he didn’t have the energy or money for litigation. The only asset he had was a $500,000 term life insurance policy which he desperately fought to keep in force. He’d met the last premium, but a $2,500 premium was due next week and he didn’t have the money for it and had no chance of getting it. He could surrender himself to the life insurance company, tell them that he was dying, submit to physical examinations, display the lesions on his chest and then let them buy out his policy at a discount. He thought of doing that but he had too much pride to submit himself and besides it would reduce Jack’s trust. He had another plan. Before he met Jack, he’d planned to leave the policy to his parents for their old age but they were dead. He’d changed the beneficiary to his estate and drawn a will 

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leaving $400,000 to Jack in trust, one-third at thirty, one-third at thirty-five and the final third at forty. The other $100,000 he left in specific bequests to his brother and sister’s children, several nieces and nephews. However, now he simply had no money to pay the premiums. He’d been living off cash advances against his credit cards for the last six months. He’d almost reached the limit on all his cards. Jack’s earnings as a part-time waiter and bartender barely covered their food bills. Derek was using cash draws on one card to pay charges on the other cards and was being dunned daily by collection agents, two or three calls a day. He told them he was dying and had life insurance to pay his debts, but they wouldn’t believe him. There were too many angry voices. More voices than he could understand or handle. 
     So, he drew one last cash advance and flew to London to get away from the angry, dunning voices and tonight was sitting in a tuxedo with a small red ribbon on his lapel, drinking Chardonnay in the ornate Victorian lobby of the Hotel Russell in Russell Square in Bloomsbury. He sat on a sofa in the lobby staring up the grand balcony at a portrait of the Queen above the huge crystal chandelier. She stared back at him down the regal, marbled staircase with the icy hauteur of the young, beautiful Elizabeth. She was dressed in a blue cape trimmed in ermine. She held two scepters, one in each hand, one of Law and one of Equity. “Administer not Law so that thy should forget Equity.” He smiled to himself as he remembered the rites of coronation. 
     “So,” he said to her silently. “Your Majesty. I have a room on the seventh floor. Should I charge a bottle of Dom Perignon to my room? Take it upstairs. Drink as much of it as I can and just step off the window ledge? Would that be conscionable in Equity? My policy is paid for, I’m beyond the two-year period for suicide. If I were in Chicago, there’d just be a short notice in the paper. ‘Loop Lawyer Jumps From Hotel.’ Not even a murmur from the passing crowd. ‘Far from the madding crowds ignoble strife.’ What say thee, Lisbeth?” He held his glass up to her and drank his wine. 
     The lobby was crowded with office Christmas celebrants. Dozens of tall, elegant, young men, young buckos in formal dress. All hues of young men, tall, thin, broad shouldered, weak, strong, virtuous, beauteous, mean spirited, charitable, avaricious. After all it was Christmas, and they were having a marvelous time at an office Christmas party, perhaps 300 people in the hotel’s grand ballroom. Young women in black dresses, elegant blondes and dusky Indian maidens with eyes shining like incandescent rupees whilst the young buckos entertained them by attempting to mount a mechanical bull in the center of the dance floor. It was a mechanical bucking bull, a machine with the huge head of a bull that cavorted and twisted as you 

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mounted it and held onto its horns. Slowly at first, revolving and revolving, like life itself and then faster and faster with the elegant, young men and women cheering and cheering, faster and faster as the celebrant held on, tried to hold on until he was spun off, flying into the crowd. Who could stay the longest? Who could stay the longest?
     He charged a bottle of Dom Perignon at the bar, had it opened and took a glass and stood in the back of the ballroom in his tuxedo with the red ribbon on his lapel. No one noticed him and he watched the mechanical bull and the wild, flailing, young men and then after finishing more of the bottle, he took it with him and quietly adjourned to the elevator and rode to his room. 
     He opened the old, scabbed window frame. It was hard to pull it open. The night air came rushing in, black and tasting of exhaust fumes from the traffic below, streaks of color, buses and taxis, the lights of London in invidious ribbons of color. He had written a note. He’d seen the Merchant of Venice last night at the Barbican Theater and he’d copied out Portia’s lines about mercy. It was painful for him to even use his fingers to write but he’d laboriously copied the lines from a small leather-bound copy of the play he’d bought after the performance.
The quality of mercy is not strain’d,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest,
It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes . . .
     That would be his final note. No one in Chicago had ever shown him any mercy. Nor had he asked for any. He was outside the system. He wasn’t able to join them. He could never join them. He was an outcast, never inside, always outside. “It droppeth as the gentle rain . . .” I will fall like a gentle rain, littering London’s streets, a brief stain, like a condom he had seen on the sidewalk in front of the hotel, discarded in a black pool of water. He filled his glass and put the bottle down on the table beside the open window. There were electric pigeon wires to keep the pigeons off the concrete window ledge and he reached beyond the window and touched the wires with his fingers and there was a sudden arc of sparks and he burned his fingers. He winced and took a towel from the bathroom and ripped off the pigeon wires and they arced again, sending sparks down into the street, like a fusillade of a comet. He thought of Whistler’s painting, trailings of color from a comet gently falling. No, he wasn’t going to go home and die whimpering in Jack’s arms. He would die here while he could still stand and make a conscious decision. He didn’t want to die choking and bleeding to death in his lover’s arms. He would be merciful unto himself. He spread his arms and slowly pulled himself through the window, twisting his body out onto the 

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ledge. He bent his head and put his hands together in prayer and thanked God and let himself go down seven floors unto death.

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“Who Could Stay the Longest?” collected in The Night Swimmer-A Man in London and Other Stories 29-33 (Chicago: Swordfish/Chicago, 1999).
Lowell B. Komie © [1999]

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