Drawn As Seen

On Monday morning, at 7:58, I knocked on Chambers 4.

"Come in, Ms. Sutter."

The green chair was still tipping to the left. The law books were still ranked by height. Judge Achterberg sat behind his desk in his white shirt and gray tie, and in front of him was a small cardboard box.

It had my name on the lid, in the same small neat handwriting. Wren Sutter. Seat One.

"Sit," he said. "Not the..."

"Green chair. I know."

He almost smiled. I watched it get as far as his eyes and then turn back, like a car deciding against a parking space.

"Deb told you the outline," he said.

"She said you'd tell it better."

"She's wrong about that. She tells everything better. But I'll tell you the part she doesn't know."

He folded his hands on the desk.

"My brother Pete gave me the taco socks," he said. "He was nineteen. I was twenty-eight and about to defend a man charged with something he didn't do."

"I was certain I'd ruin his life by being bad at my job," he went on. "So I got dressed in the dark. I couldn't stand to turn on the light and look at myself."

"And you put on one of each."

"And I put on one of each. Twenty minutes into my opening, I looked down."

He paused. "Ms. Sutter, I laughed so loudly that the judge asked if I needed water. I said no. Then I gave the best argument of my life, because I'd finally understood something."

"That everyone in the room is just a person trying to get dressed in the morning."

"Deb told you that part too."

"She did."

"That woman," he said, with enormous affection, "is incapable of an outline."

---

"I've worn them every trial day since," he said. "Under the bench, where nobody could see. It was never for anyone else."

He looked at the window. "When a trial gets heavy, I look down. I remember the room is full of people. Then I'm a better judge."

"Then I drew them."

"Then you drew them." He took off his glasses and cleaned them, which I had never seen him do. "And I panicked. I thought the trial would become about me, so I put on black socks."

"For four days I couldn't look down," he said. "I was a terrible judge for four days. I was short with Ms. Vandermeer. I frightened poor Mr. Okonkwo half to death. I didn't even laugh at the gnome."

"Nobody laughed at the gnome."

"Because I didn't," he said quietly. "I set the temperature in that room. I set it to freezing, and then I blamed the weather."

He put his glasses back on and slid the box across the desk.

"Harriet told me on Friday that I'd been an idiot," he said. "She used a longer word. Open it."

Inside the box was a pair of socks.

They were not a pair. One was dark green, covered in tiny pastel sticks in every color. The other was charcoal gray, with a single small easel near the top holding a tiny picture of a taco.

"For Seat One," he said. "You've spent nine years in that chair watching everyone else get dressed in the morning. I thought you might like to be in the room."

I didn't trust my voice, so I nodded.

"The orange on the pastel sock," he added, "is tangerine. I checked."

I laughed. It came out louder than I meant it to, in a small room full of ranked law books.

He didn't ask if I needed water.

---

Courtroom 4B was full at nine.

Barnaby was back in his corner, no longer facing the wall. Someone, and I strongly suspected Gil, had dressed him in a plain waistcoat and nothing else. He looked almost humble, by gnome standards.

Leon was in the bench behind me. His plaid sock and purple sock were back, and he had his coin-making pencil out.

The button man had been let into the gallery for the first time. He sat in the back row with no trays at all. He told me later that some things you don't sell. You just watch.

Priscilla had only one easel today. On it was a large hand-drawn map of the property line on Larkspur Lane. A new dotted line ran eleven inches to the left of the old one. Beside it, in Priscilla's upright writing, were the words PROPOSED SETTLEMENT.

Teddy had one pen. He had not dropped it yet.

Dolores and Gil sat at their separate tables. But somebody had moved the tables two feet closer together over the weekend, and nobody had moved them back.

"'Imminent,'" Deb said, as she passed my chair. "Eight letters. Already used it. Don't care."

Then she stood up straight. "All rise."

Judge Achterberg came in at the usual speed. But he did not take the usual route.

Instead of climbing to the bench, he stopped in front of it, at the clerk's desk, in full view of the room. He read the settlement aloud from there.

Barnaby would move eleven inches west, onto Gil's side, at Gil's expense. The tulip bed would be replanted with Velvet Duchess, also at Gil's expense. And Barnaby's seasonal wardrobe would be "jointly curated by both parties, in good faith, with costume disputes referred to mediation."

"Is that acceptable to the plaintiff?" he asked.

"It is," said Dolores.

"To the defendant?"

"It is," said Gil. "Mostly the costume part."

"Then the court accepts it. The case is closed."

The judge looked down at the paper one last time. Then he set one shoe on the rung of the clerk's stool, like a man leaning on a fence.

The cuff of his trousers rode up. Everyone could see.

Tacos. Ducks. Tangerine.

The courtroom made a sound I had never heard in a courtroom before. It wasn't a laugh, exactly. It was a hundred and forty people letting out a breath they'd held for a week. The breath turned out to be a laugh.

Teddy laughed so hard he dropped his one pen. Priscilla laughed into her easel. Leon laughed and kept drawing.

Dolores turned to Gil, and Gil turned to Dolores. This time they laughed at each other, across two feet of carpet, like the people at the barbecue in her old photograph.

And Judge Raymond Achterberg, the Iceberg, smiled. On duty. On the record.

---

I drew all of it.

Barnaby in his waistcoat. Teddy under the table, retrieving his pen. Priscilla, Leon, and Deb with her pen in the air. Dolores and Gil, two feet apart and closing.

And the judge in front of the bench, with his socks out where everyone could see them for the first time in twenty-two years.

Then I did something I had never done before.

In the lower left corner, in Seat One, I drew a woman with a board on her knees. She had a pastel in her hand and dark hair pinned up with a pencil, because that's how it was.

She wore a green cardigan, because that's what I'd worn. One green sock covered in tiny pastels. One gray sock with a tiny easel.

I'm not in the room, I used to say. I'm the part of the room that's watching.

But I draw what's in the room. And I was in it.

When the gallery emptied, Leon leaned over the rail and turned his sketchbook toward me. He had drawn me too, from behind and a little to the side.

I braced for a coin. A noble profile. A jaw I didn't own.

It was just me. Pencil in my hair, smudge of tangerine on one cheek, bent over the board, frowning at it like it owed me money. It was the least flattering drawing anyone had ever made of me, and the best.

"Every line," Leon said. "As it was."

I gave him back his pastel from 1994. There wasn't much of it left.

I sent the scan to Marcus at 4:15. At 4:16 he called.

"Wren," he said. Then, for the first time in six years, he used a whole sentence. "That's the best thing you've ever drawn. I'm going to put it on at six, and I'm not going to say a word over it."

He did say something over it, of course. Headlines are hard to quit.

On my way out, Deb was at her desk by the door, filling in the last square of the Monday crossword in pen.

"'Not even,'" she read aloud, and looked up at me over her glasses. "Three letters."

I looked down at my socks.

"Odd," I said.

"Odd," said Deb, and wrote it in.