“Whatever,” I scoffed, still feeling pathetic. I averted my eyes and took another sip of my martini. When I looked back at Matt, he was staring at me. “What?” I asked.
“I just don’t understand why you do that,” he said, shaking his head.
“Do what?” I asked suspiciously.
“Put yourself down like that,” he said. “You always do that.”
I looked at him in surprise. “Matt, I’ve maybe had three or four conversations with you in my entire life,” I protested, feeling suddenly defensive. What, like he thought he knew me or something because we’d said hello to each other a few times at cocktail parties and at bars? “I don’t always do anything.”
Matt shrugged. I noticed with some surprise that he didn’t look unpleasant or aggressive. Just concerned. That was worse, somehow.
“I didn’t mean to offend you,” he said matter-of-factly. “I just meant that you should give yourself more credit.”
I glared at him, still defensive, even though on some level I knew he was trying to pay me a compliment. It didn’t feel like it, though. He didn’t know what he was talking about.
“Thanks for your input,” I said drily. “But that doesn’t carry much weight when you’re just here out of pity for me. Or as a favor to Emmie because her friend can’t get a date to her firm dinner on her own.”
The second the words were out of my mouth, I regretted them. Even I knew that one of the cardinal rules of dating—not that this dinner with Matt was a real date, but still—was never to tell the person you were going out with what an abysmal failure you were with the opposite sex. And I had just broadcast it loud and clear.
“Harper,” Matt said slowly, looking at me strangely. “I’m not here as a favor. I’m here because I want to be here. See, you’re doing it again. Putting yourself down.”
What was he, a psychiatrist? Well I wasn’t interested in any dime-store amateur psychoanalysis tonight, thank you very much.
“Okay, whatever,” I said quickly, because I didn’t want to be having this conversation anymore. I took a long sip of my drink, draining the glass. I suddenly felt a little light-headed. “Are you ready to go?”
Still peering at me strangely, Matt nodded and took a long sip from his own drink, finishing it off. In silence, he took my glass from me and carried them both into the kitchen, where I could hear him rinsing them in the sink and setting them on the counter. He returned a second later. As we stepped into the hallway and I locked the door behind us, Matt put a hand on my arm. I turned to look up at him
“I really do want to be here, Harper,” he said softly, looking at me with such intensity that my heart started doing that crazy pitter-patter thing again. I forced myself to look away. Those green eyes were deadly.
“Okay, thanks,” I said brusquely, studying the floor. Whatever. He was an actor. I didn’t believe a word he said.
Besides, wouldn’t he have asked me out long before now if he wanted to date me instead of waiting for Emmie to practically beg him to go out with me?
Of course he would have.
I rest my case.
I HATED FIRM dinners. Really, I did.
But there was virtually no way out of them. Partners were required to go. I would have had to fake a death in the family or something if I couldn’t come up with a date. And believe me, I had done so in the past. More than once.
Booth, Fitzpatrick held these firm dinners four times a year, once a quarter. I firmly believed that they were simply institutionalized forms of torture.
For example, the dinners were always on weeknights. Did it make any sense for one of the most prestigious firms in the city to hold dinners on nights when all the associates and most of the partners should presumably be staying up late, holed up in the office, reading legal briefs? No. It just meant that everything was thrown into disarray for the week for everyone but the senior partners, who didn’t do a lot of hard work anymore and wouldn’t be caught dead in the office after 6 pm anyhow. Clearly they had forgotten what it was like to be lower down on the totem pole.
Another reason that I strongly believed this was just some cruel form of torture was that I didn’t really care for most of the people I worked with. It’s not that I disliked my co-workers. But with a few exceptions, the people around me were really competitive. I wasn’t. Okay, that might sound nuts, because obviously I had a little bit of a competitive streak in me, too. But really, the only competition I’ve ever felt is an internal one. I competed with myself to get good grades and ace the LSATs. I pushed myself to get a great job and succeed at it. I was happy for my co-workers when they got promoted, not jealous of them. And when I’d made partner, it hadn’t been at anyone else’s expense; I was the only patent attorney in the firm who concentrated in chemical engineering. It was such a specialized area of law that few people went into it. And because there were fewer sharks swimming in my pond, I was worth more to the company and moved up more quickly. It wasn’t that I was any better than them; I just went into a different area of law. And I worked hard to be good at what I did. End of story.
But many of my co-workers didn’t see it that way. Most of the attorneys I’d been shoulder-to-shoulder associates with my first few years at the firm were senior associates now. None of them was a partner yet. And although I had never been particularly close to any of them, the day I had made partner had also marked the day that any friendly camaraderie they had shared with me had vanished. I’d even overheard a bathroom conversation once in which Kendra Williams, a property associate, was telling Wendy Jo Moyer, a tax associate, that she knew for a fact that I’d slept my way to partner. The rumor had spread like wildfire, and I’d heard it repeated behind my back several times.
But ever since that rumor had spread, people had treated me differently. I think they were glad to assign a reason to why I had ascended the law firm ladder more quickly than them. And because that “reason” involved me being a corporate slut, they felt they had me pegged. It didn’t seem to cross anyone’s mind that I had perhaps earned my promotion. Nope, there had to be a sinister explanation.
So firm dinners were awkward, to say the least. At work, I could remain professionally friendly to the attorneys who gossiped about me without really getting into any sort of conversation with them. But at dinners—well, you were expected to talk. To socialize. And I had trouble doing that with people who didn’t seem to like me all that much. I’d been a partner for three years now, so the initial sting had faded, and I was on decent terms with everyone. But they treated me differently. I no longer fit with the associates. And I didn’t really fit with the partners, either. I was one of the only women, and I was the youngest partner by more than a decade. So just as in my dating life, I was the odd man out. Or rather, the odd woman.
The third reason I believed that these dinners were institutionalized torture was that it just underscored the firmwide divide between the Marrieds and the Singles. If I didn’t fit in with the partners to begin with, believe me, my singleness made matters ten times worse. They didn’t know what to make of me. The one time I had bravely shown up at a firm dinner without a date, I had been mostly ostracized because, it turned out, the partners whom I worked with every day at the office suddenly felt it was inappropriate to chitchat with a dateless woman—it made their wives uncomfortable. The wives, meanwhile, didn’t want to chitchat with me because I was one of the attorneys, not one of the spouses. So I had literally wound up at a table with no one on either side of me—and the attorneys and their wives across the table all but ignoring me.
Very comfortable.
Since then, I had always managed to find a date of some sort. Tonight was the closest I had come to being dateless, so in a way I was grateful to Emmie for pressuring Matt into coming. At least I had someone. I could usually rely on my friends to set me up with a bad blind date who was a friend of a friend of a friend or something. Usually, the guy and I wouldn’t have anything in common, but my date always wound up at least semi-con
tent, because the dinners were always held at nice restaurants, and they got a nice free meal.
Who said men weren’t easy to please? Now, if only I didn’t up and ruin it by, horror of horrors, being intellectual and successful. Terrifying, I know.
“Harper!” exclaimed William Bradley as Matt and I walked through the door into the back room of The Lotus Room, an upscale restaurant on 24th Street that often hosted corporate events. William was one of the senior partners, a thin, balding man in his midsixties who had unsuccessfully experimented with wearing a toupee a few years back before it flopped off his head once during his closing arguments in a multimillion-dollar civil trial.
“Hi, William,” I said, extending my hand. We shook hands firmly, then he turned to smile at Matt.
“And who might this be?” William asked, nudging Matt jovially. I rolled my eyes. At every firm dinner, William basically accosted my poor, unsuspecting date the moment we walked in the door. “Are you the man who’s finally going to make an honest woman out of our old maid here?”
I forced a smile. I mean, who didn’t just love being called an old maid by her co-workers?
You’d think an attorney would realize that this was an in-appropriate way to talk to a colleague, especially given all the sexual harassment and gender discrimination rules in place in the American workplace these days. But apparently I was giving William Bradley too much credit.
“This is my friend Matt James,” I said to William in a strained voice.
“Pleased to meet you, Matt,” William said warmly, slapping Matt on the shoulder as if they were old friends. Matt looked vaguely startled, and I felt even more embarrassed. I hadn’t known that was possible. “Our Harper here is quite a catch, don’t you think?”
What was he, my embarrassing dad or something?
“Um, yes sir, I’m sure she is,” Matt said, shooting me a confused look. I just shook my head and closed my eyes. Two more hours. I had to be here for two more hours. Then I could leave. Time had slowed to a crawl.
“She can’t seem to hold on to a man, though,” William continued. This time I groaned aloud and looked at Matt in horror. I was nonplussed to see that he was clearly stifling a laugh. Not that I blamed him. “It’s the darnedest thing, son,” William continued, oblivious to my obvious humiliation—and Matt’s obvious amusement. Not to mention the inappropriateness of this whole conversation. “No one here can understand it. A nice girl should be able to be married by the time she’s...how old are you, Harper?”
“I’m thirty-five, William,” I said through gritted teeth. “Just like I was when you asked me at the last firm dinner.”
“Of course, of course, thirty-five,” he said, shaking his head in wonder. “Why, my wife had already had three children by the time she was thirty-five.”
I refrained from asking him which wife he was referring to. The first one—Pamela—had been his age and had given him his three adult children. I had liked her. The second one—Mitzi (I kid you not; her name was really Mitzi)—he had married three weeks after his divorce to Pamela was final four years ago. Seven months later, she had given birth to their first child. Yeah, you do the math.
“We’re going to go find our table now, William,” I said with a sigh. Please, just let this be over quickly. “Nice seeing you.”
“Yes, nice to meet you, sir,” Matt said, smiling at William and shaking his hand.
Still internally cringing, I led Matt away from William and toward the tables in the back of the room. I hoped we wouldn’t have to mingle for too long before Jack Booth and Franklin Fitzpatrick, the two founding partners, tapped their glasses and asked us all to sit down.
“Nice guy, that William,” Matt said into my ear as we crossed the room. I turned to scowl at him, hoping my embarrassment wasn’t too evident. He was smirking at me. Not that that was any surprise.
“You have no idea,” I muttered. “These firm dinners are horrible.”
“I don’t know,” Matt said with a shrug, still smirking. “I think they seem pretty fun.”
“I bet you do,” I said under my breath. He grinned at me, his green eyes sparkling. I glared back, wishing I could slink out the back door without anyone noticing.
By the time we sat down thirty minutes later to a first course of salads with some sort of red wine vinaigrette, Matt looked so amused that I feared he was about to burst. Thankfully, he managed to contain himself. As we’d made our way to the table, before finally being saved by the clink of Booth’s and Fitzpatrick’s glasses, Matt and I had been approached by three partners, two senior associates, and a junior associate—all of them men and all of them married—wanting to know how serious Matt and I were about each other. Not that I was surprised; every guy I’d brought as a date to one of these dinners had been subjected to the same. Who knew that my colleagues cared so much about my social life?
Actually, it wasn’t that they cared. It was that I unsettled them. They didn’t know what to make of a thirty-five-year-old single woman who was a partner in her firm and, horror of all horrors, wasn’t in a race to the altar.
Little did they know I wasn’t even in the running. But when they saw me with a guy at the firm dinners, I think they felt a bit better, like they had me pegged just a little bit more or like I was fitting into their ideal-lawyer mode just a little bit better. In their narrow view of the world, I supposed I was intended to be at home, barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen or something. Not that that would ever happen. Pregnant: maybe someday. But barefoot? No, I liked my shoes too much. And in the kitchen? No, I was the world’s worst cook. Nope, this law firm was just where I belonged, whether they liked it or not.
“Your co-workers sure are interested in your personal life,” Matt said quietly to me as we picked at our salads. Around us at the ten-seat table, four other partners and their spouses talked comfortably in quiet conversation. I glanced over at the only female partner at our table, Mildred Mayhew, a fifty-something tax attorney, whose husband seemed thoroughly absorbed in what she was saying and not at all ill at ease at a table full of his wife’s colleagues. I felt a momentary pang of envy. Would I ever have that?
Then again, Bob Mayhew was a mousy little man with a comb-over and a complete lack of assertiveness. I was pretty certain I didn’t want that!
“They just don’t know what to make of me,” I said softly. “I’m sorry. I’m sure this is embarrassing for you.”
“Not at all,” Matt said, shaking his head. “I’m just surprised that they’re that pushy. It’s strange. It’s like they desperately want you to get married.”
I nodded.
“It’s the weird politics of this firm,” I explained quietly. “Actually, it’s probably like this at any big firm.”
“Like what?” Matt asked. I glanced at him and noticed that his expression appeared to be truly curious. I sighed.
“Socializing is a big part of getting ahead here,” I explained, careful to keep my voice low so that the other partners at my table didn’t hear me. Matt nodded, listening carefully, and I went on. “I’ve made partner already, but that’s just because I threatened to walk out, and they couldn’t lose the only attorney they had who specialized in chemical patenting. But I’m never going to fit in on the next level if stay single. I’m never going to be thought of as one of them. It’s weird. I never get invited to any of the other partners’ private dinners or anything—the ones where the real politics of the firm are discussed—because I’m single. They have all these little couples dinner parties where nearly everyone is invited but me...because they don’t know what to make of me. I don’t come as a set of two.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Matt said softly, staring at me. He almost looked like he felt sorry for me, which made me squirm uncomfortably in my seat. I didn’t want his pity.
“That’s the way it is,” I said with a shrug, averting my eyes. “It’s no big deal.”
“But it’s the twenty-first century,” Matt protested.
“And as w
ith probably every major firm in the city, the mentality here is stuck fifty years in the past,” I said immediately. I glanced around the table to make sure no one was listening. Of course they weren’t; I was generally the social leper at firm functions.
“But isn’t that sexual harassment or some sort of discrimination or something?” Matt asked, looking confused. “Wouldn’t a bunch of lawyers know better?”
“None of it is overt enough to sue over,” I said with a shrug. “Not that I’d sue anyhow. But it’s not like anyone ever says, Harper, you’re being excluded because you’re single. Or You’re being passed over for promotion because you haven’t tied the knot. It’s just the way it is.”
“But there are other female partners, obviously,” Matt said, looking around the room, then back at me. “Surely they all didn’t get married right out of school or anything.”
“They were all married by the time they made partner,” I explained softly. “And they’ve stayed married. Unlike the men here, most of whom are on wife number two or three. One of the guys”—I paused and nodded at an overweight sixty-something man at the next table over who was sitting with a blonde woman who looked younger than me—“is on wife number five.”
“So there are different rules for the men and women?” Matt asked incredulously. He was staring at me with those gorgeous green eyes, and for a moment I felt sad in a way I couldn’t explain.
“Yeah, the rules are different,” I said.
“That’s fascinating,” Matt murmured, and all of a sudden I realized that he wasn’t interested in me and my predicament; he was interested in the underbelly of firm politics so that he could enhance his performance on The Rich and the Damned. Of course. My heart sank. For a moment, it had felt like he actually cared about me. But that was silly, wasn’t it?
By the time we got to the main course, the other couples at our table had started talking to us, comforted, apparently, by the fact that Matt seemed to be an attentive date—an actual half of a couple with me, instead of simply a blind date one of my friends had stuck me with. Little did they know that whatever chemistry they thought they perceived between us was simply Matt doing what he did best: acting. Granted, he was doing a pretty good job of it. He had even slipped his arm comfortably around my shoulder a few times, and I had caught him gazing at me adoringly once when I was talking to Bob Livingstone across the table about a complicated case I had worked on last month. Matt had looked away as soon as I glanced at him, but I was impressed at all the work he was putting into making this look like a real date. I would have almost been convinced—if I didn’t know better.
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