I tapped on the door and went in. Law firms are more informal than big corporations, where nobody dares disturb the person above him in the chain of command.
Taylor looked startled, as if I’d caught him in a fantasy of his own. Maybe I had. “What’s up?” he asked distractedly.
“Not much,” I told him. “I just wanted to apologize.”
He raised his eyebrows. His sleeves were rolled up at the cuffs. It made him look adorably boyish. “What for?” he asked.
“For having to leave the client meeting,” I told him.
He looked blank.
“Jason Krill. The phone call,” I prompted him.
“Oh, right.”
This was worse than I thought. He hadn’t even remembered I was supposed to be there. He watched me patiently, the way people do when you interrupt them at a cocktail party and they’re just waiting to get back to their conversations. I couldn’t think what to say next. The seconds ticked by.
“Was there something else?” Taylor asked finally. His fingers toyed longingly with the edges of the papers in front of him. He softened the dismissal with a smile.
“My mother,” I blurted out. The words were hanging there before I knew what I was saying. Damn, damn. Why did I say something like that? “I’m sorry,” I said hopelessly.
Taylor truly focused on me at last. “Becky, is there something wrong? Is your mother ill?” He actually sounded a little concerned. That only made it worse.
I shook my head. “No, she just…calls. A lot. Sometimes it’s hard.” I shrugged. “She’s old.” I couldn’t believe I was making such a fool of myself, babbling about my personal problems when I’d hoped to impress him with my professional dynamism. I started to back away.
He looked at me. “I’m afraid I don’t understand. Do you need some time off?”
I shook my head.
“Would you like to leave early? You don’t have to ask.”
“No, not that,” I said.
“What, then?”
I took a deep breath. Be assertive. Cool. In charge. “I need to get up to speed on the Krill matter,” I told him.
He picked up his pen and glanced down at the papers on his desk. “Oh, okay,” he said, sounding relieved. “Melissa can fill you in. She’s on top of it. Why don’t you talk to her?”
“Thank you,” I told him with a cheeriness I was far from feeling. “I’ll do that right away.” I made for the door, not before noticing that my panty hose had a gigantic run right down the front of my right leg.
“Good,” he said. He didn’t look up.
I should probably explain about Taylor Anderson. But then again, maybe I don’t need to. If someone’s been a fantasy object for six years without anything much happening, there probably isn’t a lot more that needs explaining. Besides, it is so trite to have an unrequited crush on your boss. So giggly. So unprofessional. So desperate.
Not that I was alone. Before I took up jurisprudence as a money-making activity, I had leisure to notice that plenty of the staff were similarly afflicted in Taylor’s presence. The female attorneys were a little more subtle about it than the secretaries, but let’s face it, the man was almost too good to be true. I’ve already mentioned the part about being an Adonis (a Scandinavian Adonis, but no less mythical for that) and the Armani suits. Shallow qualities, maybe, but when you consider the Harvard Law degree, the private pilot’s license, the conversational knowledge of French and Spanish (I’d heard him talking with clients on the phone), the bequests to the art museum and the zoo, the entry in Who’s Who in the West, plus the aforesaid physical attributes (they encourage you to use words like aforesaid in law school, along with other electrifying expressions such as herein and the party of the first part), the total package was pretty attractive.
For some of the time I’d worked at the firm there had been a Mrs. Taylor Anderson, a pretty, petite salon-blonde who’d been an engineering undergraduate at Stanford, where they met. I saw her at several Christmas parties for the staff, where she gushed with insincere bonhomie and kept a watchful eye on Taylor at the same time. Well, who could blame her? Her husband was the walking embodiment of the brass ring, and that counted more than a wedding band, at least in some quarters.
Not in mine, though. I’d been around enough to know that affairs, not marriage, are what men like Taylor have with their underlings, and affairs were tacky and time-consuming, not to mention rude. Besides, I didn’t even have time to date—an affair was out of the question. I didn’t have the wardrobe for it either, much less the body. I mean, the younger generation could engage in serious debates on the virtues of a return to Modesty, but mine didn’t have a choice. Before the maniacally aerobicized eighties it might have been easier, but now it was impossible.
Like all fantasies, Taylor’s personality was mostly a projection. He might have slurped his spaghetti and eaten peas with a knife at home, but to me he was like some exceptionally attractive painting on a wall—unchanging and essentially unreal. Since I had never, in the six years I’d spent at the firm, had a real conversation with him that didn’t involve work, this was a surprisingly easy illusion to maintain. I was free to imagine him in any situation I wanted without ever encountering any messy disappointments. I entertained a sneaking suspicion that he didn’t have much of a sense of humor—all right, I knew it for a fact—but what do you need jokes for on Mount Olympus? He was great to look at, fine to listen to (on legal topics at least), satisfying to think about, and, in light of my divorce and its aftermath, reasonably safe as a love object.
If only his wife hadn’t left him.
I don’t know the particulars, though there was certainly enough speculation about it around the firm. I can’t imagine who you would leave Taylor for. Brad Pitt? Steve Jobs? It boggled the mind. Anyway, Taylor was suffering. Not the teeth-gnashing, hair-pulling, weeping and wailing kind of suffering, but a toned-down WASP version of an alluring melancholia. He lost weight. His eyes developed little lines of strain at the corners. He lost his train of thought in midsentence. He looked vulnerable. But underneath it all there was a tiny signal being transmitted like pheromones. He probably didn’t even realize he was doing it.
He was looking.
If he ever really saw me, he would want me too. He would get up from his desk and walk into my office, closing the door behind him. He would come toward me, arms extended. His kiss would be soft, at first. Everything in the right place. Expert…
Bad. Very bad. Don’t even think about it. A sure road to professional disaster.
My superego was working overtime.
My id wasn’t so sure.
The one thing (in addition to common sense, not to mention lack of invitation) that had so far kept me from testing the waters was the certainty that Wendy would be sure to notice, and I would be forever classed with Melissa as some hysterically hormonal office hussy.
Anyway, between my mother’s phone call and the meeting with Jason Krill, I had a pretty alarming view of my status, both professional and otherwise. I have to say that while it was bad enough to be ignored as a woman, what really galled me was that I’d worked my tail off for six years to land on the attorney’s side of the desk and it looked like a hollow victory. Unless I did something soon, I could be back to answering the phones in no time.
“I’m doomed,” I said, picking at the run in my hose with my fingernail. They’d been brand-new that morning. “Sabotage by wardrobe.”
“Don’t be melodramatic.” Lauren Gould, senior associate, mentor, and all-around good person, sat across from me and sipped her tea. “You should just keep another pair of panty hose in your desk drawer, or wear pants, like me.”
I glanced involuntarily at her legs as she sat in her wheelchair. She always wore pants, she’d told me, because her leg muscles were so emaciated from disuse she thought she looked terrible in anything else.
“That’s not the only problem,” I told her.
She laughed. “I know, but you have to admit
I have a point. Weren’t you ever a Girl Scout? ‘Be prepared.’ Don’t you remember?”
“I hated Girl Scouts,” I told her, with only slight exaggeration. “I was too shy to sell cookies. It was torture. I ended up buying boxes of them with my allowance so my mother wouldn’t drag me door-to-door through the neighborhood. Then I ate them.” I looked at her. “Remember badges?”
She nodded. “Badges weren’t so bad. But camp…” She was getting into the spirit, I could tell. “Jollywood, they called it. There were concrete paths to the cabins, and if you stepped onto the dirt someone yelled, ‘Stay on the path,’ through a bullhorn. And there were tarantulas.”
“In the cabin?”
“No, on the trails. But anywhere was bad enough.”
I tried to imagine her as a girl, hiking, before the accident. At least I assumed it was an accident that put her in the wheelchair; she didn’t talk about it, and I didn’t want to pry. She’d only been at RTA about a year, a lateral hire from a firm that had broken up over some legal shenanigans of one of the partners. We didn’t know each other well enough to share personal calamities. Besides, there were enough things in my biography that I didn’t feel like broadcasting to the world either.
She saw me looking, so I said quickly, “I didn’t like all those planned activities: canoeing, tennis, archery, softball. Somebody was always going around with a clipboard telling you what to do next.” I laughed. “My ex-husband could never understand why I wouldn’t go to Club Med.”
“I liked all those things,” she said, and I suddenly wondered if I’d been tactless.
“That’s probably because you weren’t the last one to be chosen for every sport,” I told her. “I was pretty uncoordinated.”
She looked at me.
“It’s true. It’s still true. My ideal in the exercise department is Fran Lebowitz.”
I expected her to laugh, but she looked serious. “Becky, don’t,” she said.
“Don’t what?” Even though she was ten years younger than I was and the closest thing I had to a friend in the firm, she was still a senior associate (soon to be partner, if the grapevine was correct), and when she said something in that tone, I listened.
“Don’t be self-deprecating, even as a joke. I mean it. Especially not here. It won’t get you very far in the law.”
“Not even if it’s true?” I joked.
“Especially not then,” she said earnestly. “Clients don’t want their lawyers to have flaws. It’s like doctors. Do you want to know that your surgeon drinks too much and paws the nurses? I don’t think so.”
I repressed a shudder. I knew about doctors and their public image. “I see your point,” I told her.
“Look,” she said, leaning toward me conspiratorially. “I know you’re worried about being taken seriously as a lawyer around here.”
I looked around quickly, hoping I wouldn’t catch Melissa lurking in the doorway listening.
Lauren smiled and lowered her voice. She was very perceptive. “What you have to do first is prove you’re one of the guys. And I mean that figuratively. It includes the women partners too.”
“How do I do that?” I asked her. “I don’t have any business.”
She shook her head. “Nobody expects you to have your own clients as a first-year associate. That will come later. Right now you have to work harder and longer than you probably want to in order to show everybody you’ve got the right stuff.”
I stared at her.
“I’m not kidding. I know it sounds like macho nonsense or hazing or something like that, but every self-respecting attorney thinks he works harder than everybody else. Especially in a firm like this that has something to prove. It was the same at Eastman, Bartels, where I worked before. In the beginning, you’ve got to show that you buy into it, or nobody will trust you. Keep your billable hours up. Way up. Later on, you can get your life back.”
“How much later?”
“Much later.” She gave me a pitying look. She knew I had a son in college, a rebellious teenage daughter, and a mother constantly hovering near disaster. I thought about Diane Keaton in Baby Boom and wondered if there was some nifty business I could run out of my house that would net me a couple of million dollars.
“I’ll try. I just hope I can pull it off,” I said.
“Are you sure you want to? You’ve got a lot on your plate already.”
By the time my name came up for partnership, she might be one of the people deciding my fate. So I didn’t say, “I really don’t think I have any choice,” which was the truth. Instead I told her, “I can handle it.”
Chapter Three
I hustled my determinedly assertive, just-one-of-the-guys self down the hall to Melissa’s office for an update on what I’d missed with Jason Krill. She was talking to Ryan James, a volcanically ambitious associate who virtually seethed with intrigue. The conversation stopped abruptly when I entered the room.
“Can I help you?” Melissa said coolly, as if I’d shown up on her doorstep hawking Tupperware.
“Sorry to interrupt,” I said, “but Taylor thought you might be able to fill me in on Jason Krill’s business plan.”
Ryan stood up. “I’ll catch you later,” he said to Melissa in an undertone. “How’s it going, Becky?” he asked me, in a normal voice.
“Fine,” I said. I thought he still looked furtive, but that was his usual expression. When you’re a first-year associate, doors are always closing on you, literally and figuratively. It comes with the territory. Other people go into rooms and talk about things you know nothing about. The message is, It’s none of your business, at least not till you’re one of us.
It was firmwide too. The secretaries did it to the Xerox operator, the paralegals did it to the secretaries, the associates did it to the paralegals and to each other. The partners did it to everybody.
“Sit down,” Melissa said when Ryan had left. “As a matter of fact,” she said conspiratorially, “I’m glad you interrupted us. Sometimes he’s a little too intense, if you understand what I mean.”
Directly across from me on her desk was the latest edition of Metro magazine, its hot-pink cover proclaiming articles on “131 Ways to Be a Prodigy with His You-Know-What” and “Aardvark to Zebra: How to Be an Animal and Drive Him Wild Wild Wild.” Underneath it were copies of PC Week and Fortune. Conflicting signals indeed. No wonder poor Ryan felt “intense.”
“I imagine I do,” I told her.
Melissa looked at me suspiciously. She had an excellent brain, and she could detect sarcasm when she heard it. I shouldn’t have given in to the impulse, but I mean really. What did she expect me to say—“That swine!”? Besides, I was already suspect for not sharing her enthusiasm for running in marathons, a topic on which I had virtually nothing to contribute.
“Well,” she said eventually, “did you bring the meeting notes?”
I handed them to her. “They’re not very useful,” I said. “I was called out early.”
She tossed them back at me. “Oh, yes. Your mother, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact it was,” I said steadily.
“Well,” she said again, “do you know what to look for in a business plan?”
“Not entirely,” I told her. One of the things you learn very fast when you start working at a law firm is never to pretend to know something you don’t. Never.
She sighed. “Don’t they teach people anything in law school anymore? Lawyers need to know this stuff.”
I waited. I knew she hadn’t learned it in law school either. Law school operated on the theory that if you understood the general principles, you could find out the practical details on your own.
She sighed again. “All right,” she said finally. “Think about what you need to say to convince someone to give you money. You have to tell who you are, what you’re proposing, what the market is, who the competitors are, and why you can beat them, as well as how much money you need and when you’ll need it. You have to constru
ct a spreadsheet of monetary milestones timelined out—showing things like when you’ll need to pay rent, buy equipment, hire employees, et cetera. With me so far?”
She looked dubious so I nodded.
“Can you guess what one of the most important elements of the plan is?”
I did know that one. “An exit strategy for the investors.” Venture capitalists wanted out of deals in about five years, depending on the circumstances. They didn’t want their money tied up forever.
She looked surprised. “That’s right, Becky.” She made it sound as if I’d just won the Middle School Spelling Bee. “How did you know that?”
“I read Business Week,” I said.
She seemed nonplussed and unsure whether to believe me or not. Finally she said, “Here. Why don’t you take this and see what you can do with it? If you don’t mind, I need it on my desk by Monday morning.”
Strictly speaking, only partners had the power to order you to do work for them, but I’d more or less asked for it, and this was how you learned things. And much as I hated to admit it, I could learn a lot from Melissa.
“I’ll be happy to help you out, Melissa,” I told her. “As a matter of fact, I do have one or two ideas for improving it.”
She looked at me. “Do you? That should be…interesting.”
This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. I’d never imagined, when I got the foundation grant that paid half my tuition to law school, that six years later the reward for my labors would be to be yoked in juridical servitude with some condescending, self-infatuated whiz-kid lawyer half my age. Worse, I had to admit in my most candid moments that I was just a little bit jealous of her. I mean, she was always right. I wondered, if I’d gotten my act together decades earlier, if I could have been a woman without obstacles or uncertainties too. Unfortunately, the critical decades had passed, and now I wasn’t too thrilled about Lauren’s well-meaning exhortation to put my life on hold and my nose to the grindstone, a position that was unlikely to be anatomically advantageous or a great deal of fun. I thought I’d spent enough time on hold already. What is that saying—“Life is what happens when you’re making other plans”?
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