“I think you only need one bite for the good luck to kick in,” Vanessa said.
“Well, I need all the good luck I can get,” I told her as I continued devouring the piece of cake.
“Yeah,” she said, “Me, too. Save some for me.” And with that, she began to dig into the cake. Within seconds, we were onto our second piece, adorned with a sugar rose (undoubtedly a symbol of even more good luck), which we split in two. I ate my half with my hands while Vanessa ate hers carefully with her fork.
After we finished, we took another spin around the reception — from the bar to the bathroom, meandering through some of the tables filled with the more famous faces in attendance. (I knew that was Matt Damon!) After a few laps, we finally found ourselves back at our table, all alone. Jenna was up dancing with her husband, and the other guests from our table were scattered about. It dawned on me that this may have been the first wedding Vanessa had ever attended alone. She fidgeted and looked unsure of what she should do. She began to pick at a dinner roll.
“Isn’t anyone going to ask us to dance?” she asked me, looking around the reception with hope in her eyes.
“It doesn’t look like there are any single guys here,” I said. I thought but didn’t say: “And even if there were, odds are they would be too insecure/immature/arrogant/flat out rude to even ask.”
“So,” Vanessa said, looking around the reception again, “I guess we’re all alone now.”
“Welcome to the world of the single girl.”
25
Sitting at my table, I could see him from across the dance floor. Jack. He was still here. Jackie was still at the wedding, after all — I knew he couldn’t leave me. I smiled to myself. He was dancing and as the crowd cleared a bit, I could see the redhead trying to wrap her tentacles around him once again.
Without thinking, I stormed across the dance floor, grabbed Jack and kissed him. The redhead jumped back and the rest of the crowd faded away as we kissed and kissed and kissed.
“So, does this mean that you think that I’m ridiculously good-looking after all?” he asked me.
“Well, you look ridiculous,” I replied with a smile.
“Let’s dance,” he said, and took my hand. He gave me a gentle spin and I fell into his arms, slowly, as if it had always been meant to be.
“Let’s just say that it means that any guy who puts on a skirt for me is something special,” I said.
“It’s about the legs, isn’t it?” Jack asked. “I’ve got great legs, don’t I? I knew you wouldn’t be able to resist.”
“You’re right,” I said, leaning into him. “I can’t.” He kissed me.
“But you’re not going to make me dress up in it again, are you?” he asked as he pulled away slowly. “Like some bizarre, kinky sexual fetish?”
“God, no,” I said, shuddering at the thought. I would never do anything crazy like this ever again in my life. I had learned my lesson. From now on, I will be honest and try to behave like the normal, well-adjusted big-time lawyer that I am.
“Damn.”
“Don’t worry,” I assured him. “I have other tricks to get you to show me your legs.”
“You dirty, dirty girl,” he said, and gave me another peck on the lips. He spun me around and I fell into his arms again.
“So, is this the part where we would normally fess up everything and tell everyone the truth?” I asked him.
“Probably,” Jack said.
“That we’ve perpetrated this huge fraud on the Scottish community but that we’re sorry and then we all hug or something?”
“Probably.”
“But, we’re not going to do that, are we?” I asked.
“Hell, no,” Jack said.
“Thank God,” I said. “See, this is why people hate L.A.”
“Yeah, all of the people are so phony,” Jack agreed.
We kissed and it was perfect. Absolutely perfect. We kissed and kissed and kissed and we didn’t care about who else was there or where we were.
“Brooke,” Jack said.
“Yes,” I said, eyes still closed.
“Do you have it?” Jack asked.
“Have what?” I asked.
“The initial research on likelihood of confusion,” he said.
I opened my eyes, and I was not at the wedding anymore at all — it was just a daydream. A positively delicious daydream, but a daydream nonetheless. I wanted to go back to the daydream where I was still at the wedding, kissing Jack and he had forgiven me for kissing Douglas and everything had been sorted out. Instead, I was in a conference room back in New York at a strategy meeting on the Healthy Foods case. Jack was there, only he didn’t look as if he wanted to kiss me. He just sat across the conference-room table seething and silently hating me.
I sat up in my chair, hoping that I looked as if I were paying attention to the meeting, and not daydreaming about Jack and me kissing.
“Yes, of course I have that research,” I said, knowing full well that Jack knew that I did not. It was the research project the partner on the case had tried to give me on our way out to California the previous weekend. Jack knew that I hadn’t done any work on the case over the weekend and that I had been so tied up on my other cases that I hadn’t even looked at Healthy Foods all week since I’d been back. And it was Thursday. For a minute I was actually nervous that Jack would tell.
“I think that Brooke can handle the follow-up research, as well, then,” Jack told the partners. “By Monday, Brooke?” Jack said. Monday? Did he just give me a weekend assignment? Jack had just banished me to the office for the whole of the weekend. And he hadn’t even tried to pretend that he hadn’t by giving me a Tuesday due date. He was angrier than I thought.
“Not a problem,” I said. “We’re still set to go to the client together tomorrow?”
“Were you taking Brooke to Healthy Foods?” one of the partners asked Jack.
“I’ll take Tina with me to the client tomorrow and Brooke can stay here and do the heavy lifting. Right, Brooke?” he asked.
“Of course,” I said. I could not believe that he was going to take Tina Epstein, the first-year associate on the matter, to the client and leave me here to do research — all weekend long, mind you — when the first-year associate could easily have done it. And probably should have. I billed out at a much higher rate than a first-year associate.
I left the meeting in a daze and walked back to my office on autopilot. I couldn’t believe that I wouldn’t be going with Jack to the client. I was really counting on that time alone to talk to Jack. An hour’s drive there and back were all I needed to apologize and make him realize that he was still madly in love with me. I even had a cute outfit planned for it and everything.
I walked back to my office and slumped into my chair. How was I going to get Jack back if he wouldn’t even speak to me? He hadn’t returned my phone calls or e-mails since we’d been back and my only hope at getting him alone was the work we’d been scheduled to do together.
The phone rang and I checked the caller ID. Jack’s name came up. Jack was calling me! He must have been trying to act professional in our meeting so that neither one of us got fired. Surely, if he’d told the partners we were going to Healthy Foods tomorrow they would have noticed that the man is totally, completely, madly in love with me. I should have known it was all an act all along! Turns out, Jack really is a good actor!
“Are you back in your office?” he asked me.
“I’m right here,” I said and a smile came to my face.
“Okay,” he said, “I’m swinging by.”
Of course he was coming to my office! Because Jack still loves me. So it doesn’t even matter if I have to work all weekend or miss going to the client or any of it at all. Because I have what I really want — Jack. Well, truth be told, I’d rather not work all weekend, but…
I began to prepare for the big reconciliation. I shuffled through my purse for some lipstick and Listerine breath strips. Making up is the best. I
t’s so good that it almost even makes up for the actual fighting. No doubt Jack will come up to my office, pull me into his arms while he says, “I was crazy to ever let you get away, even for a minute,” and ravish me right there on my desk. Just thinking about it made me blush and smile even wider.
Then I began to panic. I reached for the pressed powder and blush, and even pulled my hair out of its bun and flipped my head upside down to give my hair a few good shakes.
Just as I was scouring my drawers for some perfume, he knocked on the door.
“Come in,” I said as nonchalantly as I could, waving my arms above my head to make the cloud of hair spray and pressed powder dissipate.
“I’m so happy you’re here,” I said, getting up from my desk so that I could be at the right angle for him to pull me to him and ravish me.
“You left your legal pad in the meeting,” he said, holding it out at arm’s distance.
“Oh,” I said, grabbing the pad. I flipped the pad over, hoping that Jack didn’t see the front page where I’d scribbled Jack, Jack, Jack with little hearts all over it.
“Jack, we should talk,” I said.
“Talk?” he said. “I don’t think that there’s anything left to say.”
He turned on his heel and walked out the door before I even had a chance to formulate a thought.
26
When I got back to Vanessa’s apartment after work that night, she was sitting on the couch, glued to the television screen, flipping through the channels. The apartment still smelled like cheap Mexican takeout. I could tell she had been crying.
“Bad day?” I asked her. She nodded her head yes.
“Do you want to talk about it?” I asked, throwing my bag down and approaching the couch.
“I don’t think that I’m ready to talk about it yet,” she said.
“Okay,” I said, “when you are, let me know.” She nodded and kept flipping channels. I picked my bag back up and went to the spare bedroom — my bedroom for the past few weeks — and threw my stuff down and took my shoes off. Unbuttoning my pants as I walked, I opened the closet door and grabbed a pair of pajama bottoms to change into. On the closet floor there was a basket that hadn’t been there that morning. Trying as hard as I could not to peek inside (read: not at all), I saw a pile of picture frames with assorted pictures of Vanessa and Marcus. I knelt down and picked the first one up — a sterling-silver Tiffany picture frame filled with Vanessa and Marcus’s wedding photo. I ran my finger along the side and felt a tear come to my eye. I could barely imagine how hard this was going to be for Vanessa if it was this sad for me.
“Did you eat yet?” Vanessa called out from the living room. I jumped up like a kid who had been caught with her hand in the cookie jar, almost dropping the frame that I was holding in the process. “There’s some leftover chicken fajita if you want it.”
“Thanks,” I said, making a fast exit from the closet and changing into my pajama bottoms as quickly as I could, practically tripping out of my black work pants as I did so. I walked back to the living room in a walk-run to account for the time I’d been nosing around Vanessa’s guest bedroom. “I’m not really hungry,” I said, throwing a pillow against the side of Vanessa’s lounging body and putting my head down. She continued flipping through the channels.
“I have some Lean Cuisine frozen pizzas,” she said.
I jumped up from the couch and headed toward the freezer. I noticed that Vanessa had thrown out the carton of Rocky Road ice cream that had been there just this morning. Marcus’s favorite.
“Did Marcus move his things out?” I asked, turning from the freezer to face Vanessa. Her eyes stayed glued to the television screen.
“Yeah,” she said. “It’s strange, though. He was never really here that much, so the place doesn’t seem any emptier.”
“How do you feel?” I asked, taking the frozen pizza out of its box and turning the oven on.
“Sad, mainly.”
“Sad because it’s sad, or sad because you did the wrong thing?”
“Does it matter?” she asked.
“It’s never too late to change things if you did the wrong thing,” I told her.
“Do you really think that?” she asked, turning to look at me. I answered her quickly. I didn’t need to think about it at all — I really did.
What if when Jack had asked me, I’d considered for more than just one day whether one of us should leave the firm? What if I hadn’t shrugged it off? Hadn’t shrugged him off?
And why had I done that? For a job that I didn’t really like? Not that I would have immediately quit my job for a kiss, but maybe if I’d taken him more seriously back then, I wouldn’t have let the last few years just pass me by. Jack would never have gotten engaged and I would never have met Douglas and Jack and I would be together. Like I told Vanessa, you can’t change the past, but it was never too late to change your future.
Those very words came back to haunt me the following morning.
“You can’t change the past, but you can change your future,” she sung, leaning over my bed at 6:00 a.m.
“Five more minutes, Mom,” I moaned as I tried to pull a pillow over my head.
“No way!” Vanessa yelled as she pulled the pillow off my head, “You said that we were turning over a new leaf today!”
“That was really more for you than me,” I said, eyes still tightly shut. “I meant that you should turn over a new leaf today. My leaf is just fine.”
“What about all those changes you said you were going to make? You said,” Vanessa reminded me as she opened the wood blinds, “that you were going to start training for next year’s marathon with me?” As I turned over to face away from Vanessa, I vaguely recalled telling her the night before that I would begin training for the New York City Marathon with her. However, at the time, I was trying to convince her to let me eat raw cookie dough from the tube (she seemed to have some silly concern about raw eggs), and I really would have said anything just to get the goods.
“Statement made under duress,” I said, opening my eyes slowly. It was so early in the morning that the room didn’t get much lighter with the blinds open. “Not admissible.”
“Well, I’m holding you to it,” Vanessa said, grabbing the blanket off my bed and dragging it behind her as she left my bedroom. “Get up. We leave in fifteen.”
A half hour later, we were out on the city streets — Vanessa looking great in skintight running pants and a snug fitting Howard University sweatshirt, and me looking as if I’d just rolled out of bed in yoga pants that I rarely ever used for actual yoga, but wore more for just bumming around the apartment, paired with the cashmere hoodie that I’d worn the night before and grabbed off my bedroom floor that morning.
“I feel better already,” Vanessa said, jogging in place as we waited at the light to cross over Fifth Avenue to get into the park at the Seventy-second Street entrance. “Don’t you?”
Now, I wish I could be one of those people who says something like “You know, once I got out there, I felt great!” I really do. But I’m not. Once I got out there, I didn’t feel great. In fact, I felt worse. The sad fact was that I was absolutely exhausted by the time we’d jogged from Third Avenue to Central Park.
“Am I expected to go work a full day after this?” I asked Vanessa. She pretended not to hear me, continuing to run, nodding at other runners as we passed in a bizarre supersecret handshake sort of way. There was this weird subculture of runners in the park, a subculture that Vanessa was clearly a part of. A subculture of people who actually enjoyed getting up at daybreak.
These were not my people.
“So, do you want to talk about things?” she asked me, giving a brief glance in my direction.
“No,” I said (between huffs and puffs). “Do you?”
“Well,” she said, “running certainly clears my head. Helps me to think about things.”
“Why can’t you get that from taking a shower like regular people?” I asked her. “That
way you don’t have to get all sweaty.”
“I think in the shower, too,” she said.
“So, what are you thinking?” I said.
“This is going to sound crazy, but I’m so embarrassed about my marriage breaking up.”
“That doesn’t sound crazy,” I said, still huffing and puffing. “That’s totally natural. You know, you don’t have to tell anyone for a while. It’s your business. The whole firm doesn’t need to know every little piece of our lives. You can take your time in processing it by yourself.”
“Yeah, I guess,” she said.
“And before you know it, you’ll be back out there,” I said. “You’ll find someone even better.”
“The thought of dating in Manhattan totally terrifies me. What if there are no men left?”
“There will be plenty of men left,” I said with a laugh, even though that exact thought had gone through my mind more than once. “You should just take your time. It’s also okay to be alone for a while.”
“I don’t know how to be alone,” she said.
“Well, not completely alone,” I said. “I mean, you still have your friends. We can go out for dinner all the time, go to the movies, shop….”
“We do that already,” she said, stifling a laugh.
“I know,” I said. “I just meant that you’re not going to be alone, alone. If you want to, it’s okay to give yourself time to be single and not looking for someone new.”
“I don’t know how to do that,” she said.
“That’s okay,” I said, “I’ll show you.” Vanessa smiled at me and I smiled back. I knew that Vanessa would be just fine. It was just a matter of making her realize that she’d be fine, too.
She led us over to Writer’s Walk, a beautiful tree-lined path with enormous sculptures of famous poets and writers. I took a deep breath of fresh air and decided that I would be just fine, too.
“Hey, Vanessa!” a voice called out from ahead of us.
“Hey!” Vanessa called out as the other runner approached us. She introduced me to a friend of hers from the Road Runners Club. Another woman who was similarly attired in skintight running pants and a fitted sweatshirt that she looked great in. I smiled and tried not to look completely winded as I shook her hand and she and Vanessa jogged in place and talked about next year’s New York City Marathon. I had stopped jogging altogether, puzzling over what time the hot-dog vendors set up their carts. I know, I know, a hot dog would have been totally inappropriate this early in the morning, but I figured that a hot salted pretzel couldn’t hurt. Purely for medical reasons, that is. What? A girl has to keep up her blood sugar, doesn’t she?
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