All Eyes On Her

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“Don’t do that, Cam,” she warned him, twisting around to reveal the dragon tattoo climbing up her right shoulder. “Don’t even think about it. I am not your mother. You can’t blame me for her splittin’ on you and your pops.”

“It’s not about that,” he told his hands.

She straightened before asking, “Why can’t you look me in the eye when you say it?”

“Baby, I—”

“No! Don’t give me that!” she yelled and gestured with the lit end of the cigarette. “I see the way your dumb teammates look at me. They’re laughing at me, and I don’t know why! You have the balls to say that I’m not on your side? What about you bein’ on my side for once? What about not letting them laugh at me! I’m your wife, damn it. Not some stripper you guys called up to the room in Vegas and think the wives won’t find out about it!”

“Look, it’s like I told you,” Cameron attempted to get a word in.

“Like you told me? What did you tell me, Cam? Huh? I can’t remember the last time I got a straight answer from you. Are you tellin’ me now that you were never in that hot tub with her?”

He hung his head.

“Answer me!”

“Not…” he started, his voice rising about twenty octaves “…not exactly.”

Lydia froze, and I saw a vein in her temple go live. She took a step forward, slammed down her palms, leaned forward on the conference table and dared him to finish his thought.

Cameron wouldn’t look up, and Lydia’s knuckles were turning white as she dug her lengthy, bejeweled fingernails into the taut black leather of the conference table, so I took the next step for them.

“Cameron, could you clarify that for us?”

“Okay, like…here’s what it was. I mean, I was with her in that hot tub.” He reached out for his wife. “But it was before you and me even got engaged! You were on tour and it was like…two months since I even seen you. But those pictures from that magazine…they weren’t me. That party was at the same place, but it was during the playoffs, and that was waaaaaay after we already got married. It was the same girl with a different guy. I didn’t break my marriage vows with her, boo, I swear!”

Lydia was stoic, her unflinching glare burning a hole into Cameron.

After what seemed like forever, Cameron turned to me. “Monica, you said to tell her the truth.”

two

MOMENTS AFTER OUR MORNING ASSOCIATES’ MEETING I COULD feel Cassie, our team’s assistant, struggling to catch up to me. She would have been a lot more aerodynamic if she didn’t insist on wearing those five-inch heels to work every day. Besides, compared to my shrimpy five feet four inches, she was practically a giraffe in the first place. Leaping up from her desk just outside the conference room, she tailed me right into my office and kicked the door shut behind me.

“Can I help you?” I smiled conspiratorially, rounding my desk.

“God, she is such a witch!” She popped her gum aggressively for affect.

“Who?” I feigned ignorance, slipping my jacket off of my shoulders and over the back of my chair.

“Oh, shut up.” She leaned over my desk as I settled into my seat. “By the way, nice suit. Tahari?”

I nodded, logging back on to my computer. The only daughter of a Greek-American missionary and a woman from Northern India (a Peace-Corps baby, as she had originally described herself to me), Cassie had immediately adopted me as the older Indian sister she never had. Her gratefulness for any connection to the subcontinent sparked my maternal instincts toward her, ever since the first time I noticed the pride with which she ordered everything extra spicy (I’m Indian, she routinely informed any waiter within earshot.)

“Great cut.” She nodded her approval at my ensemble, which was quite the compliment considering that prior to Steel, she had been in the women’s apparel department at Nordstrom’s. “Anyway, that’s not the point. I can see everything that goes on in that meeting through the double glass doors. Stefanie was staring at you so hard that I had one hand on the fire extinguisher the whole time, in case you actually burst into flames.”

“Well, good lookin’ out?” I tried.

“I got your back.”

“It’s not that bad.” I slipped on my glasses and grabbed a stack of snail mail out of my actual in-box.

It wasn’t like I was unaware of the situation; it was more that I felt like it was my responsibility, as one of the few professional females at the firm, to maintain a certain level of decorum.

“Yes it is, Monica.” She began watering the potted ficus in the corner, and then paused as if she just realized something. “You know what it is? Baskania! It’s baskania! In Greek, you know? Evil eye? I knew I felt something horrible radiating out of her!”

I shook my head, tossed a letter from the Young Friends of the Getty Museum into the trash and reached for another envelope.

“Come on,” she said. “I know you know what I’m talking about. What do we call it in Hindi?”

Cassie’s mother had all but denied her that half of her heritage while she was growing up, as a protest against having been disowned by her family for running off with the American missionary all those years ago. Consequently, Cassie had never visited India, and spoke little if any Hindi at all. What insight Cassie could claim into any part of her family history came almost exclusively from her immigrant Greek grandparents. And it didn’t help that, according to her, the Indian girls at UCLA were less than welcoming to anyone who didn’t seem Indian enough for them. I told her they were too jealous of her beauty to allow her to play in their reindeer games, but I knew that for her it was small consolation. The way she described it Cassie had the subcontinent to thank for nothing more than her outsider mentality and her deep brown eyes. From Greece, however, came her facility with Greek cuisine, her encyclopedic knowledge of Greek mythology and her tendency to suspect everyone of everything.

Sometimes I was just glad I was on her good side.

“Yes, I know what you’re talking about, and you’re wrong.” I exhaled. “We call it nazar in Hindi. But in the old wives’ tale—and it is an old wives’ tale—they say that too many compliments to a healthy baby or a beautiful bride pisses off the gods. It makes them jealous because no human should be envied as much as a god. So the gods take revenge on the child or the bride to mitigate the hubris. And we both know that Stefanie isn’t exactly in the habit of complimenting me.”

“So what? She smiles at you with that hateful hateful look on her face. It’s the same thing.” She made herself comfortable in the chair across from my desk. “Besides, Medusa never complimented her victims, you know. She didn’t have to. She just dried them up by looking at them and that’s why they talk about turning people into stone. She sucked all of the moisture right out of them. Seriously. So kids got diarrhea. Big, strong men became impotent. Women couldn’t nurse their babies because they couldn’t produce milk. Everybody she hated literally dried up.”

“How do you know?” I asked without looking away from my e-mail. “Were you there?”

“Seriously, the myth says that young mothers could no longer lactate!”

“Okay, yuck?” I repositioned my bra around my ribcage with my elbows.

“It may be gross, but it’s also universal, Monica. In Greece they would make Stefanie spit into holy water and then have you drink it,” she pointed out, with all the self-satisfaction of a child who’d just proven in too much detail to a roomful of adults that she knew where babies came from.

Experience had taught me that Cassie wouldn’t leave until she was ready, so I decided to humor her to speed the process along. “All right, fine. You win. Why would somebody who hated me enough to curse me be willing to help me out by spitting in holy water?”

“Well, sometimes the evil eye is unintentional. Like what you said about too much praise…too many compliments…making it accidental. Sometimes it’s Medusa, and sometimes it’s just too many compliments.”

“So being admired has roughly the same effect as being hated?” I raised my eyebrows to demonstrate that it added up. “That’s comforting.”

“In Mexico they would roll a raw egg over your entire body,” she continued, ignoring me. “And then crack it open to see if the yolk was shaped like an eye.”

“Kinky.”

“I’m serious. And drying up isn’t a good thing. First you would have dry skin…then you’d start itching, then lose your hair. Think about it, the evil eye could cause premature aging!” She snapped her fingers and pointed at me with too much satisfaction.

“Malocchio, huh?” Jonathan added, having opened the door and invited himself into the conversation. “I don’t know much about it, but I do know that when I was a kid, my grandmother used to dribble olive oil into water and then study it like tea leaves to see if we were cursed.” We both looked at him.

“Yeah, she did it whenever we visited them in Iran. She said it was because I was such a cute little boy that the people in the village were probably jealous.”

“See?” Cassie insisted.

“Malocchio…Isn’t that an Italian word? Not a Persian one?” I asked.

“Well…you know the, umm, flavor of the month?” He raised half of what would have been a unibrow were it not for the weekly waxing appointment he didn’t think I knew about. “Daniela? She’s from Milan, or Florence, or Rome or something. I can’t remember. But I know it’s in Italy. Anyway, she’s rubbing off on me because she doesn’t speak much English. Pretty soon I’ll run out of Italian restaurants to take her to on the West Side. And you know I don’t go farther east than West Hollywood. Oh well, I guess every relationship has an expiration date.”

Jonathan was the only man I knew who could be smarmy and endearing at the same time. Kind of like your horny kid brother offering to rub sunblock on your girlfriend’s back at the beach.

“Oh, right. Back to you, ladies.” He stepped away defensively. “I forgot, it’s all about you ladies. Jeez, don’t you get sick of talking about yourselves all the time?”

It may be useful to point out here that I know for a fact Jonathan actually spends more on skin care than I do. He was the perfect example of that weird hybrid of raging insecurity and blinding self-entitlement unique to a Beverly Hills upbringing. The only son of a wealthy Persian family who fled Iran in the 1970s, he had earned his bachelor’s and JD degrees at UCLA, had never lived more than five miles away from his parents, and categorically refused to date any woman who wasn’t blond and at least five inches taller than himself. The latter fact, as he had explained to me over a working lunch shortly after we both joined the firm, was because all the fun was sure to be over once he decided to grow up and settle down with a nice Persian virgin.

Meanwhile, the fact that he weighed roughly 100 pounds with his pockets full of lead, in a town full of men who looked like walking G.I. Joe’s, probably had nothing to do with his need to have the latest cell phone, the newest Maybach, and the pimpin-est table at any club he ever set foot in. But Jonathan was good at what he did, we looked out for each other when the workload got too steep, and the demonstrated depth of his family values had long since mitigated some of my revulsion at the double standards by which he lived. Also, he was a good ally to have within the firm because something about his playful smarminess seemed to make our two-timing clients feel at home. Jonathan, clearly, would make partner.

“Anyway, that doesn’t mean I’m with you on this home-remedy stuff, Cassie,” he elaborated. “I could’ve done without my grandmother spitting into her hand and rubbing it onto my cheek all the time.”

“Are you wearing a pink shirt with that suit?” I squinted at him.

“Daniela said it brings out the color of my eyes,” he defended himself.

“Since when does pink bring out brown?”

“I know, I know,” he admitted, shaking his head. “I have to break up with her.”

“Hmm, I’ll get some bottled water for your office anyway,” Cassie reassured in the most serious of voices. “So you’ll have it handy in case you find yourself starting to dry up, that is.”

“Oh, gross.” Jonathan winced. “Is this a woman thing?”

“No, it’s not a woman thing, you troglodyte. It’s a superstition thing.” I shook my head, averting my eyes with a grin. “Anyway, Cassie was on her way out, so you and I should get to work.”

The problem with acknowledging another woman’s envy is that it implies you actually believe you are somehow superior. And I never saw any reason for Stefanie to envy me. She was attractive, intelligent and a formidable future litigator in my opinion. And when we had first arrived at the firm I had imagined we would be friends. Or at least convivial colleagues. Boy, did I have a lot to learn back then.

Cassie noticed my smirk. “What did you do at that meeting?”

“Nothing. I brought everyone up to speed on Cameron and Lydia’s case.” I saw her perk up like a puppy that had caught a whiff of kibble. “And I don’t plan on telling you anything about it, so scoot.”

She whimpered, which would have been annoying coming from anyone else. But since she had started working with us a year before, Cassie had become the little sister I never had. The one with the heart of gold. And the poor taste in men. And the sick fixation on every detail of the personal lives of celebrities. Naturally, it made the opportunity to work at Steel both completely irresistible and supremely frustrating for her.

“Need-to-know basis, babe.” I continued, “And you don’t need to know the specifics of their relationship. We’re lucky we can even tell you who the clients are.”

“Fine. But sometimes this attorney-client privilege stuff goes too far.” She air-parenthesied the words in protest. “Besides, I’m practically family.”

“Don’t let Niles catch you saying that.”

“That I’m family?” She looked hurt.

“That we ought to share privileged information with family,” I corrected. “Because believe me, Sheila never hears word one.”

“Sheila’s only your cousin, Monica. I’m the one who knows all your dirty little secrets,” she teased on her way out the door, oblivious to Jonathan’s eyes sparkling. “And that makes me closer than family.”

Once she was gone, Jonathan swiped my marked-up copy of the Camydia division-of-assets proposal off of my desk. He made himself comfortable on my couch, propped his feet up on the coffee table and started scanning through the notes I had made in the margins.

I seized on the chance to check my e-mail once again. Still no messages from Raj.

“Don’t worry so much, Monica.” Jonathan peered over his memo. “Whatever these dirty little secrets are, I’m sure we can have them taken care of. I know a guy.”

“I don’t have dirty little secrets, Jonathan,” I said, scowling. “I have a…problem. And I don’t think it’s anything Bruno can help me out with.”

Bruno was one of those wannabe Hugh Hefners littered across the California basin who made local news for depressing real estate prices, erecting neon signs and waving freedom of expression banners everywhere he went. His was the first case Jonathan and I worked on together, and when he came to us he was convinced that his eighteen-year-old stripper wife, Claudia’s refusal to keep dancing at his club meant that she was cheating on him. Yes, the strip-club owner was worried that the stripper was cheating on him. In much the same way as a dog owner worries that his dog might be licking itself while he’s away. I, for one, was shocked.

Before breaking the news of the impending divorce to his wife, Bruno came to us to find out how much it would cost him. Although he could have gotten the same advice for a cheaper price from any of our lesser-profiled competitors who catered to the rich, if not-so-famous, Bruno, like so many others who worshipped at the altar of celebrity, needed desperately to believe that his life mattered to the general public, and was therefore worthy of Steel-strength confidentiality.

At one point, after yet another grueling day of poring over his convoluted tax returns, Bruno invited us over to the club for some drinks. Rather than offending the client, I went along to The Cinnamon Lizard for just one drink, and then made my escape on the premise of an early appointment with my personal trainer. Honestly, I hadn’t seen that much purple neon lighting since the weekend I spent in Atlantic City. The next morning Jonathan informed me that our client’s real name was in fact Eugene Bronstein. A good Jewish kid from the tree-lined suburbs of Massachusetts, Eugene had moved to Los Angeles to reinvent himself after the collapse of his career as a stockbroker and the failure of his first marriage to his high-school sweetheart.

Emboldened by all those shots of Jim Beam, Bruno had decided to brag to Jonathan about the sophistication of his entrepreneurial operation. He gave him a personal tour of the two-story building that housed the most popular of his three strip clubs, located just off Sunset Boulevard. Below street level there were two additional floors, containing an X-rated bookstore, private lap-dance suites, bachelor party rooms, six-person showers surrounded by one-way mirrors, peep shows and even a carpentry shop where Bruno’s artisans built and repaired the peep show booths on site. None of these ancillary sources of income, it turns out, had been mentioned anywhere on Bruno’s tax returns.

According to Jonathan, their conversation had turned (as I’m sure that it so often does amidst flying G-strings, plentiful rhinestones and women whose breasts refused to shake when they did) toward religion. Being Jewish himself, and a devout temple-goer, Jonathan knew what he had to do. Somehow, before he arrived at work wearing the same suit and reeking of smoke and other people’s misery the next morning, Jonathan had managed to help a drunken and reluctant Eugene Bronstein see the ungodliness of trying to bilk Claudia out of her share of his empire.

Over the next few weeks, we worked out a private settlement that took good care of Claudia while sparing Bruno the ugliness of having to report anything new to the IRS. Yes, we were in the business of secrets, and the final one that I had to keep in the Bronstein case was the one belonging to Jonathan. It was his opinion that his big-man reputation simply couldn’t withstand the hit of his having convinced someone to do the right thing. And in a way I saw his logic. So I had taken the fall for Jonathan’s conscience, claiming to be the one who had forced Bruno to make an equitable arrangement. And I made a lifelong friend in Claudia Bronstein (the proud new owner of their house in Palm Springs, along with the third largest strip club in Hollywood) in the process.

“I still can’t believe that guy calls himself an entrepreneur,” Jonathan mused from the couch a half hour later.

“Meaning?” I looked up from my books on case law.

“Meaning—” he lowered his voice and glanced at the door to make sure that his pesky sense of morality would remain between the two of us “—in my opinion, a real entrepreneur is someone who makes something from nothing. Like my dad, who used all his savings to build an import business from scratch. He’s the perfect blend of an inventor and a salesman. But with Bruno, it doesn’t apply. He didn’t have to invent or sell anything. People are hardwired to want sex with ridiculously beautiful women, and to be fascinated with depravity, especially in this town. How much of an accomplishment is it when all you’re doing is essentially turning the lights on at the crack store to make it a little easier for the junkies, who were already looking to find it? Sure, he diversified into related businesses, but he never had to sell anything to anyone that they didn’t already want and kind of need.”

In order to keep some semblance of idealism alive within herself, a girl in L.A. has to search for signs of integrity in most men with the resolve of a drug-sniffing dog. Jonathan was one of the good ones, I had long since decided. And my resolution made it so much easier both to work with him and to recognize as a fact how influential in the upper echelons of the local legal community I had no doubt he would one day become.

“Okay. But he’s pretty damn proud of himself. As proud as I’m sure wife number three will be…just as soon as she turns eighteen and decides to apply for a job at his club, that is.”

“That guy doesn’t have much to be proud of.” He half laughed, turning his attention back to his work. “Take it from a junkie.”