Five Things that Never Happened to Alan Shore

[3pipeproblem]

Behold, my Alan Five Things story. You're, as always, free to skip these and go right into reading it. I wrote most of it over the summer, so it has more to do with The Practice than Boston Legal (although why I'm specifying the universe these things never happened in, I really don't know). There aren't any crazy AUs with, say, Alan as a journalist in the 1950s. I tried to make each of the scenes somewhat plausible. Each of the five scenes had to do with faith. In my mind, at least. Heh, and all of it was written before Sunday's ep, in case you were wondering.

I like some of these a lot more than others. And now that I've done it once, I'd almost like to try it again. Anyway...



i. just

He called from the office, because a call from home would have invited an entirely different conversation, one he wasn’t ever interested in having.

He didn’t call. The dial tone hummed, hypnotic, in his ear, bringing upon a much-needed mental numbness that continued until even the phone lapsed into silence. He hung up; the clatter of phone against receiver just as satisfying as it would have been had he made the call.

Then he leaned back in his chair and took inventory: books, low lighting, a watch with the big hand at seventeen and the little hand hovering over four, and a clenched feeling in his stomach that always prompted a quick prayer for another couple years before the ulcer developed.

Automatically, he went to his wallet, flipping through its contents until his hands met with the haggard texture of a business card worried half to death by the habit of turning it between nervous fingers.

Flinging the card onto the desk without giving it a second glance, he reached for the phone and jabbed in the number.

“Young, Frutt, and Berluti. How may I help you?”

He sighed, lifted a pencil and toyed with the notion of etching his name into the desk’s soft mahogany surface. ‘Alan Shore was here.’ Instead he attempted to balance it by the point-it toppled in tandem with an impatient clearing of the throat on the other end of the line. “Sir? Are you there?”

“Oh. Yes. I’d like to speak to Ellenor Frutt, please. I’m a friend of hers,” he maneuvered the words around the lump in his throat, each sentence choppier than the first. There was a pause; he replayed what few syllables had been spoken, wondering if there was a giveaway moment when guilty friends begging in a favor stuttered.

“Yes?” In the wake of her voice, brusque, professional and reassuringly familiar, he fell silent.

“Ellen-“ he’d started when she sighed, exasperated, into the phone, and he laughed. Trust Ellenor to adopt the attitude of a short-tempered customer hounded by telemarketers.

“Alan?”

Smiling to himself, he rose to his feet. “You recognize my laugh.” Abruptly conscious of the tug of the phone cord, he collapsed into the chair once more. “Yes, I mean.”

“Are you all right? You don't call…” she had the sense to trail off before he could congratulate her on the dead-on impression of his mother.

“I haven’t murdered anyone. Don’t worry.”

“What have you done?”

It had seemed, song, dance, and potential emotional trauma of actually dialing her number notwithstanding, deceptively simple. “Nothing,” he stammered out, suddenly recalling that equating simple with easy had gotten him into this in the first place.

Silence on the other end; even the exasperated sigh had vanished. Very little in the life of Alan Shore ended with silence. Voices were raised, insults were exchanged, threats were made and made good on. Silence wasn’t a prelude to absence. It was absence. He swallowed. “Ellenor, say something.”

“You need a favor.”

It wasn’t fair. It shouldn’t have been possible to miss someone while you were still on the phone with her. “No. Not a legal favor,” he amended. “I wanted to speak to you. No catch.”

“We haven’t spoken in months.” That typical note of incredulity his friends managed to hit whenever he called. He wasn’t sure which it made him feel guiltier about: not calling, or not having concocted some hopeless scheme to justify doing so when he finally got around to it.

“I missed you. How’s Zoey?” They’d met for dinner nearly half a year ago. Over chicken, she’d teased him about his corner office and expensive suits, reprimanded him for betraying those ideals of his that had survived law school. She’d finally gotten the lighthearted tone down, he’d noted happily, reminding her that he was practicing law now; what had she been up to?

“She’s fine. She just got over a cold. I’d ask about your girlfriend, but I’ll bet you remember her name as well as I do.”

Audrey. Probably. He gave that the wry chuckle it deserved and faltered back into uncomfortable silence. “What are you working on?”

“Right now, Alan, I’m trying to get an old friend of mine to explain why he’s suddenly decided to give me a call.”

One of these days he needed to dispense with the perceptive, intelligent friends. “I missed you,” he repeated quietly, closing his eyes for a brief moment. On television, police officers who’d been dismissed from the force hefted cardboard boxes brimming with personal belongings, wedged their way through former colleagues in the middle of the day, then went off to close the case on their own.

He could clear the surface of his desk with a sweep of his arm. He’d done it before, under more pleasant circumstances, a memory he allowed to bleed into his consciousness as he continued. “I’ve been fired. I embezzled. Allegedly. There’s a chance I’ll go to prison.” He took a deep breath. “In no particular order.”

He heard an echoing sigh on the other end and waited for that tiny final click abandoning him to the dial tone. “There’s a very real chance I’ll go to prison.”

“Alan.” The word was clipped, matter-of-fact. That meant he wasn’t getting a lecture. Up until that moment he hadn’t realized he’d been wanting one. “If this is a joke-a very bad joke-you have three seconds to tell me.”

He counted them out under his breath, although he might as well have done it aloud. After he’d repeated the process, this time tailing each word with “Mississippi,” he cleared his throat. “It’s not a joke.”

She didn’t say anything. He wondered if she’d closed the door to her office once she’d learned it was him, shut it carefully and precisely in order to keep everything quarantined to this one phone line.

“This isn’t going as well as I’d hoped. Could you put me back on with that receptionist? The one with the sultry English accent.”

“There’s a way out of this, Alan. We can get you out of this.”

That made him laugh; lawyerspeak without the logic or the Latin. Any conversation with a client could be distilled to just that: we can get you out of this. “I know. Always. That wasn’t why I called.” He swiveled to face the window, phone cord looping over his however-many-hundred dollar suit. He’d always enjoyed the view, the way distant cars seemed only to creep along.

“Then why?” He didn’t answer, peered down at the sidewalk below, giving her a moment to consider. “You don’t want to get out of it.” A dog trotted by, leashless, followed several seconds later by its owner. Someone ought to call the police.

“I called…” He swerved back to the desk and imagined his friend the last time they’d seen each other, her happiness never quite masking that ever-present glint of worry beneath everything. “I called to say hello.” He waited for a derisive snort, a snappish comment, some rendition of his name to remember her by. He waited until finally she began to speak. “Hello, Ellenor,” he cut her off. Then he hung up.

ii. beside the point

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

“Where have you been?”

He wishes there were a scantly clad, reasonably attractive woman hovering at the bar to justify the intensity with which he’s been staring over Sheila’s shoulder for the past…awkward interval of time. His luck isn’t doing so well tonight, though, and instead of falling back on that neat excuse he forces out a laugh and returns the fork dangling between his fingers to the food in front of him. “Did I miss anything important? If so, feel free to summarize…”

She looks at him in that way she has, appraisal and affection mingled, prompting all manner of inane questions to race through his head. Sometimes, over the course of their conversations, he catches himself opening his mouth to ask, a propos of nothing, what it is that God sounds like, exactly.

“I don’t like the haircut,” she says, a hint of mischief in her eyes. He imagines she’s restraining herself from leaning over the table and brushing her fingers through it.

“Is that all? This entire time you’ve been discussing nothing but me and I neglected to listen?”

“Well-“ the tone is one of grudging admittance, and maybe he detects on the horizon the sort of confession elicited only by a direct question because in that instant his eyes fall on the remains of her salad and he studies the collapsed tents of lettuce intently, telling himself it’s an attempt to decipher whether she’s become a vegetarian.

When she makes a decision, she doesn’t betray that fact but signals it instead, clearing her throat, and he looks up, perhaps because he knows it’s expected. “You’re wondering.”

He smiles, practiced and easy as the stroke of a golfer. “What am I wondering?”

She won’t ask if he’s sure he wants to hear it-Alan knows the hazards invited by a question if anyone does. She does wait patiently for their eyes to meet, fully expecting him to excuse himself for a moment while focusing unaccountably on the tabletop.

He tilts his head upwards so they’re eye-to-eye, his eyebrows raised in what strikes her as a wary gesture of defeat.

“You’re wondering about Her.” She might just as accurately have said, ‘you’re wondering about me’ or ‘you’re wondering about yourself’ or what really seems to be occupying his mind right now, but with Alan there’s a taut line between knowledge and pain. The reality of hearing a thought of his voiced-the sound, with its dimensions of pitch and volume, nearly a tangible object-had prompted him to retreat before, and she didn’t doubt it could do so again.

He sighs, chuckles a little, and shakes his head, his way of indicating that everything’s fine, that he’ll humor Sheila because they’re good friends and she’d do the same for him. It’s too late and too little, despite his best efforts. The scrape of silverware over a plate, a loud, alcohol-saturated conversation at a neighboring table, the slurp of an appreciative wine connoisseur, all insinuate their way into his consciousness. He overcompensates, speaking to drown out all extraneous noises and if he drowns out whatever he’s thinking as well…well, so much the better. “I try to avoid wondering about things, Sheila. It invites disappointment.”

“Ask me.” She hits whatever note transforms it from a command into a plea and although neither of them has moved during the course of the conversation, he detects a sudden urgent proximity created by her request.

“It’s to be expected,” he says, so quietly they may as well be whispering. ”Everyone…anyone who knows…” he pauses, to take stock of what’s been said, and laughs dryly.

Once she’s heard him laugh she’s reaching for his hand. “Alan…”

“What must God think of me?”

By that point it’s somehow become rhetorical and, after losing the strength to search her gaze any longer, he takes refuge in that, reaching to refill her glass and asking how she feels about ordering dessert.

iii. sanctuary

Alan had once told a first-grader that the ice cream truck played its merry-go-round, migraine-inducing version of “Pop Goes the Weasel” to warn children that it had run out of ice cream. Now, as the sound grew nearer and nearer-in that ice cream truck way, where you can hear strains of the song four blocks away, knowing that with each repetition the truck will overtake another block, only to arrive with strange immediacy outside your home-he thought about how short first-graders were.

“Ice cream truck,” Paul said unnecessarily, jumping up from his seat on the floor. The tree house quivered beneath them just the slightest bit. Alan grinned at his friend.

“How many bones do you think we’d break falling out of a tree?” Struck by another thought (that of the both of them in full-body casts at the hospital, spoon-fed ice cream by doting nurses), he laughed. “What would your mom say.”

Paul ignored him in a pointed, ten-year-old way that Alan assumed only Paul could manage. He walked deliberately over to the window they’d carved out as an afterthought and Alan, lying on his back, tilted his head against the floor so that the clomp of Paul’s footsteps was amplified to an almost painful degree. “You want ice cream?”

“Got any money?” Paul asked with a shrug, hands locked into his pockets. From those pockets, Alan had seen Paul extract bugs (of both the live and dead variety), shattered plastic propellers of toy helicopters, pocketknives, hairpins made unfeminine by the title of “lock pick.” It was Alan, though, whose step was marked by a perpetual jingle. He lent money as indiscriminately as he collected it, and could be relied upon to produce a grimy assortment of coins on cue.

Alan turned out his pockets. “Nope,” he said as a stray dime collided with Paul’s sneaker. He rolled onto his stomach, resting his head in his hands. “It’s gone now. Too late.” Curling a finger against the floor, he flicked a penny in Paul’s direction.

“It’s going to rain.” Ice cream already forgotten, Paul turned from the window and frowned at Alan as if the other boy had a bad habit of causing inclimate weather.

“Good,” Alan said decisively, still sprawled on the floor. “I want to see how she holds up in a storm.” He clapped his hand against the tree house with a degree of affection most people reserved for their pets and a force most people reserved for cockroaches found on the kitchen floor.

“It’s not a boat, Alan.”

“I know.” He pressed his face against the planks of wood, squinting at the bright, chemical-green lawn layered over the ground. “Boats don’t have holes in the fl-oh!” A fat drop of rain hit his shirt and he sat up quickly, shivering with theatrical embellishment.

He tilted his head back in conscious imitation of Paul, who had ducked into a corner and achieved an awkward-looking balance between staring at the darkening sky and bumping his head on the ceiling. “We need to go inside.”

Alan nodded gravely and hooked a foot behind Paul’s legs; the other boy teetered but didn’t collapse to the floor in quite the way Alan had imagined. Instead he fell back against the wall then to the ground in an abrupt slump. “What was that for?”

“You’re no fun today.” Paul casually slammed a fist into Alan’s stomach, effectively ridding him of any guilt.

“Jerk,” Alan accused, the signal for battle to resume after they’d spent a still minute gathering their breath.

Paul scrambled to his feet and was stomping down the ladder before Alan had time to venture another kick. As though on some sort of cosmic cue, a groan of thunder shook the tree house as Paul dropped to the no-man’s land of the lawn.

“Paul,” Alan peered down from the house with the irrational worry of a child opening his first Christmas
present and, in spite of himself, expecting coal. “Paul!”

Paul squinted up at him through the rain. “Are you going inside?”

After a moment’s deliberation, Paul shook his head vigorously, like a dog trying to dry off, and it occurred to Alan that in this weather he could probably get away with sending a wad of spit hurtling in his friend’s direction.

The thought vanished the next second, as the sky flashed dark blue, illuminating Paul-now soaked, his shorts and t-shirt drooping towards the ground-with abrupt ferocity.

“Get up here!” Alan called out, his logic veering the way of a steady diet of action movies and Saturday morning cartoons. Paul scrambled back up the ladder, his pace broken every few moments by an abrupt hesitation or a flinch as thunder rumbled once more.

Alan stretched out his hand, straining his fingers as though convinced that quarter of an inch could cross the line between life and death. Two rungs from the top, Paul was within reach. Crushing his hand around his friend’s fingers, Alan leaned back as far as he could and, eyes pressed shut in concentration, hauled his best friend to whatever sort of safety could be afforded by a tree house in the middle of a thunderstorm.

“Do you really think this is safe?” Paul asked, hunched against the wall opposite the window and staring fixedly out into the gloom.

Alan caught his breath and ran a hand through his hair, throwing it into wet disarray. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. We built it.”

iv. night

He wondered what it would be like to walk hand-in-hand down the street, instead of like this, brushing against her fortuitously and irregularly in the process of evading the occasional overenthusiastic pedestrian. Clichéd, he decided as soon as he found himself cupping his hands together and sighing air into them. It held the allure of something he’d never done before. Like riding a motorcycle or building a transistor radio.

She’d always enjoyed walking, for reasons Alan assumed had more to do with politics than the beauty of Dedham or the friendliness of its citizens. Everyone knew her, of course, and the choice few with the ability to provoke an about-face on the unkempt sidewalk all possessed an upright bearing that signaled an unmistakable, elusive, and vaguely enviable power.

He caught himself staring and averted his eyes, spinning in mid-step so that the dusky city, abrupt patches outlined by streetlamps, blurred with the beauty of the woman beside him. Well, slightly ahead of him now.

He hurried to catch up, once more falling in step beside her. “The streets are so empty at night. Why do you think that is?”

She slowed, turning her head just enough for him to catch the force of a reproving look. “Alan, there isn’t a topic of conversation to be changing. You do-“

“Is that perfume?” He’d had an idea she’d stop suddenly-didn’t know he’d had the idea until she’d done it.
He sidled up to her and, feeling faintly ridiculous in his bulky winter jacket, rested a hand on the nape of her neck. “Are you wearing perfume for me?” In a teasing imitation of a kiss, he leaned towards her, sniffing dramatically. The perfume smelled stale, still receding from an important lunch date she must have had earlier in the day.

She chuckled in spite of herself, laughing with a hesitance he’d never imagine applying to anything else about her. He adored her laugh. “Alan…”

He lifted his hand from her back, sweeping hers up in it just as he strode forward. “Yes?”

“Your hand is freezing.” Something about the way she said it made him smile. “You do own gloves, dear?” The follow-up should have stung, but he was struck by the idea that she’d missed a beat in timing it. He clung to that belief more resolutely than he was holding her hand.

“At my house,” he murmured finally.

They walked in silence amplified by the cold and the incongruity of the gesture, Alan staring at the linked shadows cast by the streetlamps, rough charcoal lines hewn into the sidewalk. He imagined it was cold enough that he could see his breath. He imagined his breath as light, as the hazy glow from above. He imagined he could feel her gaze on him, the quiet regularity of their footfalls underscoring its intensity. Then he wondered when she’d let go.

“I feel like I should be doing this to make sure you cross the street safely,” she muttered.

He'd released her hand before she'd finished the sentence.

v. nine-tenths

He wakes up. Her scent-something momentarily eluding his absurdly encyclopedic knowledge of perfumes-lingers on the pillowcase; sunlight filters through the blinds, caressing the curve of her shoulder; her hair spans the few cold inches separating him from her and he collects it in his fingers and says the first thing that comes to mind.

“Five days.”

She rolls over to face him and he regrets, momentarily, that he hasn’t yet found the opportunity to watch her as she sleeps, and then he’s contending with the force of that fondly wry smile. “My, we’re optimistic this morning.”

“I’ve every reason to be. Beautiful woman in my bed, blissful ignorance as to how she came to be there…” He smiles at her. It’s easy to grant himself that luxury because right now, in this instant, he’d like nothing more than to lean over and kiss her with routine matter-of-factness. If possession is nine-tenths of the law, aren’t they as good as married?

“It’s so early.” Her face is blurry in the light, smeared into the bright haze of the sheets, and he’d tell himself he was dreaming if his dreams didn’t typically feature other body parts more prominently. “You can’t tell me you get up this early and appear at the office as late as you do.”

“No. You’ve disrupted my sleeping patterns. If this goes on much longer we’ll send the office into an uproar.”

Another of her smiles and sensory overload-too-bright room, too-soft mattress, too-silent morning with only her accent playing in his ears. He closes his eyes and wishes he’d wake up.

“As though that’s not something you do on a regular basis.” He knows he must be breathing because he keeps trying to stop. It would be better if he weren’t-then he’d at least have a reason for feeling as though his chest has caved in on itself. He feels her shift in bed, and the presence-immediacy, fact-of the situation rankles. “Alan.”

“Tara.” Two defeated syllables with the hitch of a sigh in between and the comforting illusion of being able to go back-to what, he never considered-evaporates.

“Alan, look at me.” The novelty of his old standby coming from her is enough to surprise him into compliance. His eyes blink open and she’s at his side, just distant enough to refrain from touching and close enough for the warmth of her skin to gnaw at the inexplicable coldness that’s overcome him. “Is something wrong?”

Has there ever not been something wrong? Two minutes ago, perhaps, when he was contemplating her back in the morning light. “I don’t like what we’re doing.”

“Having a relationship? Behold my lack of surprise.”

He catches some glimmer of understanding in her gaze and curls onto his side before-before the brush of her lips on his can deprive him of whatever thoughts he’s clinging to. “Not that.” He grants her a moment of incredulous laughter, but there isn’t any. “It’s…this is a morning after scene.”

“Yes, Alan. We’ve had sex. More than once, in fact. You appear to be having difficulty coping.”

“Would that make it mind-blowing?” he asks, his chest constricting the slightest bit as he musters the response.

She kisses him, soft, chaste, on the cheek, the indentation of her touch fleeting as the cusp of the mattress she occupies. Then she draws back, not bothering to mask her appraisal of his reaction. “You are all right.”

It occurs to him there might not be a difference between understanding and pity; it occurs to him the difference may be a crease of her brow, the dip in her tone, the hesitance of her kiss, some signal that will pass unrecognized. “All the relevant parts seem to be here.” He rises from the bed, pulls on his boxers, and flicks the blinds open, closed, open, dancing the light across the bed. “Would you like coffee, Tara?” He blinks out an SOS. “I’m told mine is deadly from fifty paces.”

“Alan.”

“Yes, Tara.”

“Why not?” There’s a law book resting on his bedside table, the only thing in the room that doesn’t appear to be laboring at an awkward illusion. It’s a matter of time before she comments on the ponderous emptiness of the house, the rooms marked by a vacancy that’s all of a sudden bringing its weight to bear.

“I’d have thought death would be sufficient deterrent, but if you insist…” The words buckle beneath him and he remembers resonating frequencies: one right note and glass shatters. Bridges twist to breaking point like ropes of licorice.

He doesn’t trust himself to look at her.

“Why not?”

A glance out the window reminds him that it rained yesterday and a chance smile as he shrugged out of his jacket earned him an incredulous look from Brad. Today will be sunny.

More than anything he wants to kiss her.

He considers that this clutched feeling in his chest may never go away, and he says, “Because nothing’s different.”