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“Oh, excuse me, I forgot. Your idol, Berkowitz, King of Kings. You know what I heard about him?”
“What?”
“You have to promise not to freak when I tell you, or I’m not going to tell you anything else. Ever again.” He wags a finger at me through a too-long shirtsleeve. Black, of course, the only color he wears. “Especially about this partnership crap.”
“What did you hear?”
“Promise, Mary.”
“Tell me! We’re talking my job here.”
He leans over my desk. I can smell the Obsession on his neck. “I heard that no matter what they say, Berkowitz is authorizing only two partners from litigation. Two, not three. Two, and that’s it.”
“Not three? They said three!”
“Yeah? Well that was then and this is now. They don’t want to divide up that pie any more than they have to.”
“So they’re just going to fire one of us? I can’t believe it.”
“Here we go. I knew I shouldn’t have told you.”
“How are they going to choose between the three of us? We all have the same evaluations, and we all bill over two thousand hours a year. We’ve indentured ourselves to this fucking firm, now they’re gonna lop one of us off?” I rub my forehead on the front, where it’s beginning to pound. I’m convinced that this is the partnership lobe. It’s right next to the bar exam lobe and the SAT lobe.
“It won’t be you, Mare. You just won a big motion.”
“What about Judy?”
“Judy’s got it made. They need her to crank out those briefs.”
“And Ned Waters, what about him? I don’t want to see any of us fired, for Christ’s sake. It’ll be impossible to get another job. It’s not like the eighties, when you could pick and choose.”
“Listen to me, you’re working my last nerve. Are you having lunch with Judy today?”
“Of course.”
“Good. Go early. Talk it over with her. She’ll straighten you out.”
And she tries to, as we sit at a wobbly table by the wall in the Bellyfiller, a dingy restaurant in the basement of our office building. Judy drags me here all the time because the sandwiches are huge and the pickles are free. She doesn’t mind that the atmosphere is dark and cruddy, the big-screen TV attracts all the wrong people, and the sawdust on the floor sometimes crawls.
“You’re letting this make you nuts, Mary!” She throws up her long arms, with their Boeing-sized wingspan. Judy Carrier is six feet tall, and from northern California, where the women grow like sequoias.
“I can’t help it.”
“Why? You just won a motion, you dufus. You’re undefeated. We should be celebrating.”
“How can you be so relaxed about this?”
“How can you be so worried about it?”
I laugh. “Don’t you ever worry, Judy?”
She thinks a minute. “Sure. When my father is belaying. Then I worry. His attention wanders, and he—”
“What’s belaying?”
“You know, when you climb, you designate one person to—”
“I’m not talking about rock climbing. I mean about work, about partnership. Don’t you ever worry about whether we’ll make it?”
“Making partner is nothing compared with rock climbing,” she says earnestly. “You make a mistake rock climbing and you’re fucked.”
“I’m sure.”
“You should come sometime. I’ll take you.” She turns around and looks for our waitress for the third time in five minutes.
“Right. When pigs fly.”
She turns back. “What did you say?”
“Nothing. So you really don’t worry about making partner?”
“Nope.”
“Why?”
“Because we’re both good lawyers. You do the discrimination defense and I’m the entire appellate brief department. We’ll make it.” Judy grins easily, showing the many gaps between her teeth, which are somehow not unattractive on her. In fact, men look her over all the time, but she disregards them cheerfully. She loves Kurt, the sculptor she lives with, who has most recently hacked Judy’s buttercup-yellow hair into a chunky Dutch-boy cut. She calls it a work in progress.
“You think it’s that easy?”
“I know it is. Do the work, the rest will come. You’ll see—”
“Here it is, ladies,” interrupts our waitress, who hates us. Not that we’re special; the waitresses here hate all the customers. She slides the plates off her arm and they clatter onto the center of the table. Then she stalks off, leaving Judy and me to sort the orders. We move the heavy plates around like bumper cars.
“Girl food coming at you,” Judy says, pushing the garden salad and diet Coke to me. “Yuck.”
“Gimme a break. If I were ten feet tall I could eat like a lumberjack too.” I slide her the hoagie with double meat, a side order of potato salad, and a vanilla milkshake.
“But you’re not. You’re a little Italian shortie. Where I come from, we use you people for doorstops.” Judy bites eagerly into her hoagie. She starts at the end, like the sword-swallower in the circus. “Actually, there is one thing I’m worried about,” she says, chomping away.
“What?”
“You. I’m worried about you.”
“Me?” I can’t tell if she’s kidding.
“Yes.”
“The phony phone calls?” I take a gulp of soda. It tastes like aspartame.
“No, they’ll go away. I’m talking real danger,” she says, wiggling her eyebrows comically. “Ned Waters is after you.”
“Oh, jeez. Don’t start, Jude.”
“He wants it, Mare. Better buy some new undies.” Judy likes sex and talks about it frankly and naturally. Since I was raised a Catholic, I know her attitude is perverted and evil. Faxed from Satan himself.
“Judith, keep it clean.”
She leans over confidentially. “Be prepared to deal with the man, because it’s true. I heard it from Delia the Stone Fox.”
“Delia? Berkowitz’s secretary? How does she know?”
“She heard it from Annie Zirilli From South Philly.”
I laugh. Judy loves to make up nicknames. Half the time, I don’t know who she’s talking about. “You mean Barton’s secretary?”
“Right. Annie saw him mooning around his office yesterday and started up a conversation with him. He told her he’s interested in someone but won’t say who. He said the girl—that’s what he said, too, the girl—doesn’t even know herself, because he’s too scared to tell her. Too scared, can you believe this guy? What a horse’s ass!” She stabs at her milkshake with a straw.
“He’s shy.”
“In a kid, it’s shyness. In a man, it’s dysfunction. And I bet money you’re the lucky victim, because he always tries to sit next to you at department meetings. Plus I’ve seen the way he looks at you.” She makes googly eyes.
“Bull. If he were interested, he would have followed up in law school. After our big date.”
“But you met Mike.”
“Ned didn’t know that. He didn’t even call back.”
Judy shakes her head. “Sounds just like Waters. A torrid love affair of the mind. This guy has intimacy issues out the wazoo, I’m telling you. He’s too cool. Cool Waters, that’s him. Run for cover.” She plows into her potato salad with a soupspoon, like a bulldozer clearing heavy snow.
I watch her eat, thinking about Ned Waters. I still say he’s shy, but it doesn’t square with how handsome he is. Strong, masculine features, a smattering of large freckles, and unusual eyes of light green. “He has nice eyes.”
“If you like Rosemary’s baby.”
“Come on. He was a hunk in law school.”
“It’s tough to be a hunk in law school, Mare. If your pupils respond to light, you can screw half the class.”
I smile, remembering back to school when I had dinner with Ned. I was surprised when he asked me out, but not when he didn’t call back, because he was so quiet on the date. He barely said a word; I yammered away to fill the silences. Of course, I didn’t sleep with him or anything; that would have required 12,736 more dates, and even then I wouldn’t have enjoyed it. Enjoying it didn’t happen until Mike.
After lunch, Judy and I take a walk around the block, since it’s a warm day in spring and Philadelphia’s infamous humidity has yet to set in. We window-shop, checking out the displays at Laura Ashley, Banana Republic, and Borders, a chic bookstore on Walnut Street. I like Borders, because it’s made reading fashionable, and I like to read. Judy likes Borders because it has an espresso bar with big cookies. Big as flapjacks, she likes to say. I treat her to a big cookie, and we walk back to the office, with me feeling like the stumpy mommy to a child on growth hormones.
3 (#ulink_d29c0f54-13be-57f0-ada3-9de50e774fdb)
A black-mirrored elevator whisks us to the top of a black-mirrored monolith that is home to a major oil company, an investment banking house, and Stalling & Webb. Stalling has the building’s top seven floors, which always remind me of the seven deadly sins I learned in parochial school. Sloth is the bottom floor, where Judy gets off, and the next stops are Anger, Gluttony, Envy, Lust, and Avarice. Pride is the penthouse. I get off on Envy, which is where Martin H. Chatham IV, the junior partner on Harbison’s, has his office. I’ll tell him about the big victory after I freshen up.
Stalling’s ladies’ rooms are like heaven. They’re clean, palatial, all done in cumulus white. The Corian countertop boasts eight generous basins, each lined with fake gold. At the end of the countertop is a white cabinet stocked with all-you-can-eat toiletries—free Tampax, Band-Aids, mouthwash, and dental floss. There’s even Neutrogena, which I use liberally.
I wash my face as the secretaries joke around with me. They started to be nicer to me after Mike died, killed by a hit-and-run driver as he rode his bike along the Schuylkill River. I became a Young Widow, a character many of them recognized from their romance paperbacks. The lawyers, who have no time to read anything, barely remarked Mike’s passing, which was fine with me. It’s private.
I blot my face with a pebbled paper towel and take off.
Martin’s on the telephone but waves me in. I sit down in one of the Shaker chairs facing his Shaker desk. Everything in Martin’s office is tasteful, in a Thomas Moser kind of way, except for the owls. Needlepointed owls stare from the pillows, ceramic owls glare from the bookshelves. I used to think the owls were a high-prep fetish, like whales, but there’s a better explanation. Martin is boredom personified and must know it, so he’s seized on an interest to make himself interesting. The owls fill the vacuum where his personality should be. Now everyone knows him as Martin, the Guy Who Likes Owls. See what I mean?
“I’m listening, Stuart,” Martin says into the telephone.
Listening is Martin’s forte. He listened when I told him my idea for this motion, even as he winced with distaste. Martin’s of the gentleman’s school of litigation, which considers it bad form to put your client’s interests ahead of your squash partner’s. It was Berkowitz who green-lighted the motion, because Berkowitz is a real lawyer and doesn’t know from squash.
“Good enough, Stuart. Take care, big guy.” Martin hangs up the telephone and immediately puts a finger to his lips, a tacit whoooo! He makes a note in his red day journal to bill his time and another in his blue telephone log to bill the call. Later, Martin will bill for the time it takes him to write a file memo about the call, and he’ll bill for the cost of duplicating the memo. Martin makes $265 every hour and 15 cents every page. In the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.
“So, Mary, how did it go?” he asks blandly.
“Very well.”
“Good news?” His washed-out blue eyes flicker with interest.
“We won, Martin.”
“We won? We won?”
“He ruled from the bench. The class action is no more.”
“Good God, Mary!” Martin pumps me for every detail of the argument. I edit out the “Ave Maria” and give him the colorized version, in which I star as Partnership Material, No Question. When I’m finished, Martin calls to see if Berkowitz is in. Then he grabs his suit jacket, because THOU SHALT NOT WALK AROUND THE HALLS WITHOUT A JACKET, and dashes out.
I walk back to my office. I’ve done my job, which is to make Martin look good. That’s why he goes alone to Berkowitz’s office, to take credit for the win. Likewise, since Martin’s raison d’être is to make Berkowitz look good, he’ll let Berkowitz take the credit when he telephones Harbison’s General Counsel. Because Berkowitz has made the GC look good to his CEO, the GC will send him more cases. ASAP. And partners who bring in the most business make the most money. You get the picture: The knee bone’s connected to the thigh bone, the thigh bone’s connected to the hip bone, and so on.
I should feel happy, but I don’t. The victory lights up my Partnership Tote Board big-time, but it comes at a price. If Brent’s information is right, my partnership could cost the firing of either of two fine lawyers, one of whom is my best friend.
And don’t forget about the Harbison employees, says the little Mike-voice, come back again. They were fired just when their pensions were about to vest, and the only mistake they made was choosing a lousy lawyer. Now they don’t even have him anymore. Is that what you went to law school for?
I try to shake off the voice when I hit my office. 2:25. I run out the day’s string, listlessly dealing with the mail. I ask Brent to divide it into Good and Evil, with Good on the right and Evil on the left. The Good mail is advance sheets, which are paperback books summarizing recent court decisions. I’m supposed to read the Good mail, but if I did, cobwebs as heavy as suspension cables would grow from my butt to the chair. Instead, I put them in my out box so the messengers will shovel them onto someone else’s desk. That’s why they’re Good.
The Evil Mail is everything else. It’s Evil because your opponent’s trying to fuck you. There’s only one lawyerly response: Fuck back. For example, last week, in a case for Noone Pharmaceuticals, opposing counsel tried to fuck us into a settlement by threatening to publish company memoranda in the newspaper. So I’m writing a motion asking the Court to restrict the use of company documents to the lawsuit and to award Noone my fees in preparing the motion. This is primo fucking back, and you have to fuck back. If you don’t fuck back, you’ll get fucked.
Believe it or not, I usually enjoy this aspect of my profession, the head-banging and the back-fucking, but not today. Anxiety gnaws at the edges of my brain and I can’t focus on the Evil mail. I turn to the unfinished brief for Noone. I read it over and over but the argument sounds like a verbal Mobius strip: Judge, you should restrict the documents to the lawsuit because documents should be restricted to lawsuits. I can’t tell if it’s a failure of concentration or of writing. I pack the draft in my briefcase and leave the office at dusk.
The remainder of the day’s sunlight is blocked prematurely by Philadelphia’s new and improved skyline. Developers went crazy after City Council permitted buildings to be taller than William Penn’s hat, with the result that the city streets get dark too soon and there’s a lot of empty office buildings sprouting like mushrooms in the gloom.
The air cools down rapidly as I reach Rittenhouse Square. I’m shivering like all the other superannuated yuppies, except that I refuse to wear Reeboks. If my shoes were too uncomfortable to walk in, I wouldn’t buy them.
The square looks just like it does every evening this time of year. The old people huddle together on the benches, clucking worriedly about the young people, with their orange-striped hair and nose rings, as well as the homeless, with their shopping carts and superb tans. Runners circle the square for the umpteenth time. Walkers stride by in fast-forward, plugged into Walkmans. A pale young man on a bench looks me up and down, and then I remember.
Is someone watching me?
I look backward over my shoulder at the pale man on the bench, but he’s joined by a girlfriend in a black beret. I look at the other people as I pass through the square, but they all look normal enough. Is one of them the someone? Does one of them call me and do God-knows-what when I answer? My step quickens involuntarily.
I hurry inside when I reach my building. It’s quiet in the entrance hall, the kind of absolute silence that settles in when a big old house is empty. I’m the only tenant here. My landlords are an elderly couple who live on the first two floors of the house. They’re nice people, hand-holders after fifty years of marriage, off on another Love Boat cruise. I pick up my bills and catalogs from the floor and make sure the front door’s locked.
I climb the stairs, wondering if the telephone will ring after I get in. I unlock the door and switch on the living room light. I glance at the telephone, but it’s sitting there like a properly inanimate object. I breathe a sigh of relief and drop my briefcase with a thud.
