by Adam Mitzner
Just smiles thrown back at her. As if there’s nothing they’d rather do than work all night in the hope of returning an alleged terrorist to a life of luxury.
“I’d like to see the first draft by . . .” She looks at her watch. “It’s noon now. How about by six, seven at the latest? Then we can order in dinner and spend the rest of the evening polishing. I’ll be in my office if anybody needs me.”
AARON ALMOST NEVER WALKS around the hallways of the firm. Like a Mafia don, people come to see him. And so as he makes his way to Rachel’s office, he encounters the kind of stares usually reserved for celebrities.
Rachel is furiously typing when Aaron knocks on her open door. The sound must startle her, because she jumps.
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” he says.
“No, it’s fine. Come in.”
“So, how was your day?” he says, taking a seat.
“You know, same old same old. Our big terrorist client had his bail revoked, so now he’s in federal prison, undoubtedly planning the murder of his defense team. But otherwise, all’s good.”
Aaron laughs, which causes Rachel to break her deadpan expression and crack a smile.
“We’re working on the motion to reconsider,” she says. “We’ll go in ex parte, by order to show cause, and ask Judge Nichols to put it down for the next day.”
Filing ex parte, by order to show cause is legalese that means defense counsel will appear before the judge alone, without even notifying the prosecution, and request that the prosecution show cause as soon as possible why the order revoking bail should not be reconsidered.
“You know we have no chance, right?” Rachel says. “No way she reconsiders.”
“I know,” Aaron replies. “But the appellate court never reverses decisions that are within the trial judge’s discretion, so our only hope is that Judge Nichols concludes that she acted in haste.”
“Good luck with that,” Rachel says with a smile.
“Actually, in the first instance, you’re the one who’s going to need the luck. I’m going to see Garkov at the MCC tomorrow morning, just in case he is, as you suggested, thinking about murdering his defense team. So, you’re going to need to make the order-to-show-cause application to Judge Nichols.”
“Sounds like we’re both on suicide missions.”
13
Just how much Faith wants out of her marriage is reinforced the moment she enters the apartment and sees her husband sitting in the living room. She actually feels as if the space has gotten smaller, the air harder to breathe.
Faith hasn’t even removed her coat before Stuart says, “Do we get bodyguards now?”
“Don’t start with me,” she says. “It was a tough day.”
“I’ll bet,” he says mockingly. “Not every day you get on a terrorist’s hit list.”
“Stuart, are you really worried for my safety? Or yours? Because they offered to put a security detail in front of the building, but I know how much you hate that.”
“Just answer me this, Faith: is that what T-Rex told you to do last night? So long as you put the screws to Garkov, you’ll be on the Supreme Court?”
“This your way of not starting with me, Stuart?”
“It’s a fair question. I mean, you’re doing everything you can, seemingly ethical or not, to get on the Supreme Court . . . even though you know what that’s going to do to us.”
“You’re unbelievable. Jesus.”
“I’m unbelievable? Me? Why is that? Because we decided to live in New York City? Because I have a life here? An architectural practice that I can’t just up and move down to DC, which, by the way, has the worst architecture in the country.”
“Yes, you!” Faith yells back. “This is unreal! I know you’re not the most supportive of men, but is it too much to ask that you not do everything you can to make me feel like shit? Stuart, I could be on the Supreme Court of the United States. Do you understand what that means? The historical impact that I can have on this country? And yet boo hoo hoo, you’re complaining that you’ll have to live in Washington?” She gives a long, exasperated sigh. “You know what, Stuart? Don’t come. Stay here if you want. It’s not like we have kids to worry about—”
“That again? You knew I didn’t want to have children when you married me.”
Faith has lost the moral high ground, because Stuart is right. She knew he didn’t want children, and yet she married him anyway. Besides, this fight isn’t about that. It’s about the fact that he’s being a first-rate prick. She should just file for divorce and be done with it. It’s not like being divorced would hurt her nomination, whereas she wouldn’t put it past Stuart to sabotage her with a carefully planted off-the-cuff remark about her views on abortion. But for some reason she can’t bring herself to end her marriage, and so the United States Supreme Court is now her exit strategy. She would move to Washington and Stuart would remain in New York, either because he claimed he couldn’t leave his practice or because she asked him to stay behind. The lawyers could work out the rest with them three hundred miles apart.
“I’m tired, Stuart,” she says, meaning more than that she’s sleepy. She’s weary of fighting the same battle over and over again. “I’m going to bed.”
It’s clear from her tone that her husband is most definitely not invited.
CYNTHIA IS READING BY the fireplace, although it’s not lit—that being Aaron’s job in the division of marital chores—when Aaron arrives home that evening.
“Are the girls here?” he asks.
“Not yet. But it’s just as well, as I assume you have something to tell me.”
There’s an obvious edge to her words that leaves no doubt that Cynthia has learned of Aaron’s newest client, and that has erased the goodwill from last night.
Aaron stammers, but words don’t come out.
“I’ll save you the trouble,” she snaps. “I know that you’re representing that terrorist.”
“Alleged terrorist,” Aaron says, trying to defuse her anger with a smile.
Cynthia doesn’t see it as a joking matter. She has the look of someone ready for a fight.
“Same judge as the last case too. Right?”
He now realizes the source of Cynthia’s discontent. Apparently he was right when he told Sam Rosenthal that he overestimated his ability to keep his affair with Faith a secret. But he knows Cynthia well enough to know that she’s not going to confront him, at least not now. It’s enough she’s just given the signal that yes, she knows.
“Hopefully this one will end better,” he says.
“I assume you’re not basing that on how it’s begun.”
“Rachel is working tonight on motion papers for her to reconsider that.”
“I see. So you’re working with Rachel on this one too?”
“And what’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing, Aaron. Nothing you do is ever wrong,” Cynthia says, and returns to her book.
14
The first thing Rachel does when she wakes up each morning, even before brushing her teeth, is swallow four pills. She doesn’t remember their names, as they change every so often, when she starts to experience side effects or she feels an episode coming on. She literally gobbles down this cocktail of antidepressants and antianxiety medications, as if they were the cure-all to a poison coursing through her body.
She’s been on some type of pharmaceutical regimen since her first episode, which occurred shortly after spring break during her senior year at Stanford. At her midsemester evaluation, her adviser, Professor Gryzmala, told her that she was behind schedule on her thesis. Worse still, he said he was “disappointed,” although when she conjures the memory now (with the benefit of the meds, perhaps), she’s less certain that he actually said he was disappointed with her, which she always previously believed, rather than merely with the progress of the
thesis.
She stayed on campus during spring break to do more research, and when she mentioned this to Professor Gryzmala, he suggested that they have dinner at the faculty club to discuss the direction she was taking.
Rachel recalls primping for that dinner more vividly than preparing for her high school prom. She must have tried on six or seven outfits, trying to achieve the perfect costume that said grown-up woman, with just the right amount of sexuality . . . all without being obvious, of course.
At dinner, Professor Gryzmala ordered a bottle of wine with the perfect Italian pronunciation, even though he spoke English with a trace of a Polish accent. It was the first really good bottle of wine Rachel ever had, rich and full-bodied. Her head began to spin midway through the second glass.
The conversation was just as intoxicating. He saw things—in art, books, the world around him—that she was convinced she’d never be able to see for herself.
After dinner, he walked her home, even after she put up a feigned protest that it was not necessary. She knew he was married but had nevertheless cleaned her room and changed the linens, so there was no way she could tell herself that she was surprised that the evening was going to lead back to her place.
When they reached her door, she didn’t even ask if he wanted to come inside, so sure that they’d already tacitly made that agreement. She was more than startled when he said, “Thank you for a lovely evening. I think you’re on the right track with your thesis and I look forward to reading it.”
“Don’t you want to come in?” she said.
“Oh no . . . thank you, but no,” he said, as if the thought had never occurred to him. “I need to get back home. My wife and I always read to our kids before bed, and tonight’s my night.”
Rachel can’t remember anything that happened after that. They must have said good night, but she has no recollection of those words passing between them. She knows that there was no physical contact, certainly not a kiss, or even a touch of the arm.
The next morning, she couldn’t get out of bed.
It was as if every body part weighed more than she could lift. She somehow made it to the bathroom a few times, or for a glass of water that she didn’t remember getting but that somehow appeared as if by magic on her night table, but otherwise stayed in bed. To this day she has no idea how long she persisted in that state. Her mother called campus security when she couldn’t reach Rachel for the third day in a row. They brought Rachel first to the infirmary and then to Stanford House, a psychiatric hospital, where she spent the next month, some of it under a suicide watch, diagnosed with acute depression.
Rachel never returned to school. After her discharge from the psych ward, she spent the summer at her parents’ home and arranged to submit papers for her spring-semester classes to get the necessary credits to graduate. Professor Gryzmala sent her an e-mail saying that she could submit her thesis in the same fashion and then defend it on campus whenever she wanted, but Rachel took the incomplete, deciding that it would be best if she never saw him again.
Her second episode occurred the year after she graduated from law school, while she was clerking for Judge Norman Davis of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. Like before, her breakdown was triggered by an older man . . . although this time it had nothing to do with rejection.
Rachel met Lawrence Braithwaite, another judge on the circuit court, as part of her rotation to review habeas writs, the appeals that prisoners file by the thousands. One judge was assigned to hear such writs each quarter, and a different judge donated a clerk to assist in the review. The idea was to give the clerks an opportunity to work with different members of the court.
Even before being assigned to him, Rachel was well aware of Judge Braithwaite’s reputation for sleeping with the clerks, and sure enough, he came after Rachel like a heat-seeking missile. Even though Rachel had never lacked for male attention, part of her found his advances flattering, as if she’d been specially selected out of the more than thirty female clerks on the court that year. Of course she knew full well the perils of a relationship with an older, married man in the workplace, but in this case Rachel saw it as a limited danger because Judge Braithwaite wasn’t her boss, and her clerkship was going to end in a few months anyway.
Their affair lasted less than six weeks. Rachel ended it with him on a Friday and thought little of it until Monday morning, when Judge Braithwaite said that he’d asked his wife for a divorce so that they could be together. Rachel tried to let him down easy, explaining that was not what she wanted and that she was moving to New York when her clerkship ended.
Judge Braithwaite wouldn’t take no for an answer, however.
He called her incessantly, sent her flowers at the office, and dropped in to Judge Davis’s chambers unannounced, seemingly just to look at her. It all came to a head two weeks later when Judge Braithwaite’s wife called Judge Davis to inquire why he employed home-wrecking sluts as law clerks.
Judge Davis assured Rachel that there would be no professional repercussions, and he saw no need to inform Cromwell Altman, with whom she had already accepted employment, to begin after the clerkship ended. But when Rachel asked if she could end her clerkship early, Judge Davis seemed only too happy to oblige her.
At least this time, Rachel avoided the hospital. She retreated to her parents’ home for the summer, but once there, she could barely get out of bed again. She refused her mother’s plea to get help, with the promise that she’d start at Cromwell Altman in September, as planned. Much to her parents’ surprise, that’s exactly what happened. On the day that she was to begin at Cromwell Altman, Rachel showered, put on a dark blue business suit, and went straight to work.
The next eight years went by without incident, so much so that Rachel believed the dark days were truly behind her. She thrived on the pressure of bet-the-farm litigation, and while the eighty-hour workweek of a big-law-firm associate didn’t leave much room for a social life, she had her share of boyfriends, most of whom were age appropriate and none of whom were married.
Then she began working with Aaron Littman.
Six months before she was to come up for partner, Aaron asked her to second-seat him in the money-laundering trial of a Mexican banker named Alejandro Sanchez. In many ways, it was a standard Aaron Littman representation—guilty client, lots of money involved, nonstop work for months, and then an acquittal.
After the case ended, they had a decadently expensive meal to celebrate. Over a four-hundred-dollar bottle of champagne, Aaron told her that he would enthusiastically support her for partner.
Everything Rachel had been working toward was coming to pass. And then she was completely blindsided when it all came crashing down around her.
Unlike the prior episodes, this one didn’t all hit at once but built steadily over several weeks. The first sign was when she heard that Ellice Schwab, a senior associate who was very easy on the eyes, had been assigned to a new case that Aaron was handling. Rachel felt it like a stab to her heart. Each day that passed she missed Aaron that much more, as if she were withdrawing from an addiction. Rather than that feeling dissipating, the intensity of her emotions increased, to the point where she couldn’t bear to wake up if there wasn’t a reason to see Aaron that day.
When she started fantasizing about how much he would really miss her if she suddenly died, she checked herself into a private facility. The diagnosis was like before—acute depression—but her shrink, a little man with a white mustache, said that it was more than that. She was repeating the same pattern from Stanford: pursuing an idealized man who was unattainable and being unable to accept that her feelings were unrequited.
Rachel hadn’t wanted to tell anyone at the firm that she was in a mental ward, but she couldn’t go AWOL for a month, not right before she came up for partner, and so she told Aaron because . . . because she was in love with him. She didn’t share that he’d played a role in put
ting her there, of course. Instead, she said that she had experienced a bad reaction to her meds, explaining that she suffered from depression and that every few years there needed to be an adjustment, although she had always previously seen it coming and was therefore able to avoid hospitalization.
“I’m so embarrassed,” Rachel had said.
“There’s no need,” Aaron had answered. “This is a medical thing, Rachel. I get that.”
“I’m not sure every partner is as enlightened.”
“No one knows about this except me,” Aaron said. “I told the partners that your father had taken ill and you were spending some time with your family. Don’t worry about anything except getting better, and when you do, there’ll be a partner’s office waiting for you at Cromwell Altman.”
She and Aaron never again discussed the episode. And at year’s end, just as he’d promised, Rachel made partner.
15
The Metropolitan Correctional Center, or as it is more commonly called, the MCC, opened in 1975. Among its most famous residents have been Mafia don John Gotti, Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff, and the Blind Sheikh, Omar Abdel Rahman, who was the mastermind behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Given that Nicolai Garkov is something of a blend of all three, Aaron imagines that he’ll fit right in.