by Amanda Brown
Chutney glared at the entire group, her arms crossed.
Trent shrugged his shoulder. “My little doll, Elle Woods, has brightened up an otherwise tiresome event,” he said. Elle introduced herself to Henry Kohn and, feeling as if she had been chastised, told the lawyer that she had known Trent since childhood.
“We were just catching up,” she said, blushing faintly.
“Of course,” Henry said, with a second glance at Christopher that suggested he was not convinced. Elle followed the lawyers into a conference room as Trent, heading for the bathroom, promised to join them after he “freshened up.”
Brooke Vandermark was sitting at a conference table long enough to span several zip codes. Across the table sat a stenographer. Christopher turned to Henry Kohn with obvious displeasure.
“Your receptionist did not tell me that my client had already arrived,” he said, indicating Brooke.
Henry Kohn ignored the comment. “Perhaps Mrs. Vandermark would like another cup of coffee,” Henry replied, nodding at the white, lipstick-smudged mug in front of Brooke on the table. “By all means, help yourself.”
On another long table across the room were a tall silver coffee service, several mugs and glasses, a row of canned sodas, and a bucket of ice.
Christopher approached Brooke with a concerned, almost fatherly air. She stood up to greet him, and Elle saw him grip Brooke’s arm firmly at the elbow when he shook her hand.
Brooke’s head reached no higher than Christopher’s shoulder when she stood next to him, Elle noticed with surprise. She had expected Brooke to be taller. She had always seemed so controlling at the head of aerobics class. Now she didn’t appear a head taller than a parking meter.
The neutral of Brooke’s sleeveless linen Empire dress melded almost imperceptibly into her straw-colored hair. Elle recognized the dress, which she had considered ordering from J. Crew in a color other than this year’s “grain” or “almond,” shades fit only for the suntanned. A turquoise patent leather backpack that lay slouched by her chair and matching patent sandals provided the only shimmer of color until Elle caught Brooke’s curious stare. Her eyes, which mirrored Elle’s own, were a keen, inquisitive aqua blue.
“Brooke, I would have offered to have my driver pick you up, but I was running late. Almost missed the plane,” Christopher said.
“I’m glad to hear you have a driver, Christopher. I’ve driven with you before and I think I was safer in jail,” Brooke said. She gave Christopher a quiet smile, but when she sat back down, she was anything but relaxed. Her posture was rocket straight, her back not touching the chair back, her hands fidgeting nervously in her lap.
Christopher smiled. “Mea culpa. Brooke, this is my assistant, Elle Woods. She’s a student at Stanford Law School.”
Brooke nodded at Elle without standing.
Elle blushed, clearing her throat. “Hello, Brooke. I’m very pleased to see you. I went to USC.” Elle glanced at Chutney’s grumpy lawyer, who stood at his seat arranging a notepad next to a manila folder and a foam coffee cup. This was the wrong time for small talk. Christopher had introduced her as his assistant, and there she went talking about college right off the bat, as if this were a punch bowl at a college reunion.
This is serious, Elle instructed herself. Act like it. Don’t say anything. Nod and take notes. Brooke, apparently advised to do the same, hardly budged when Trent entered the room with a sulky glare. She acknowledged him, then set her gaze imperiously beyond him, a stiff pose she maintained throughout the designer’s testimony.
Elle smiled at Trent and sat down silently next to Christopher, backing her chair from the table to balance the legal pad in her lap. While she waited for Henry Kohn’s secretary to pour water into glasses from a heat-condensed silver pitcher, Elle began sketching Brooke’s earrings. Dangling from each of Brooke’s ears were small hoops in which two identical naked twins linked arms. Twins.
“Gemini,” Elle thought to herself. “Ruled by the planet Mercury. Longs for affection and understanding.” Good thing she had taken “Zodiac and You” for her planetary science requirement at school. When she had finished Brooke’s earrings, she began sketching Pisces earrings and wondered how to distinguish them from Aquarius. It occurred to her that Aquarius was an air sign, but rather than puzzle over it any longer, she drew a bull, which was definitely a Taurus. She never considered Taurus a woman’s sign, but figured she could market the earrings to men and women in Miami Beach or San Francisco.
The Libra scales reminded her of law school, and Elle began drawing earrings with a legal theme, which she felt was more appropriate given the circumstances. By the time the deposition ended, a model resembling Brooke was scribbled on Elle’s legal pad, adorned with Libra-scale earrings, a necklace pendant in the shape of a gavel, and a bracelet with various casebooks for charms.
Christopher had been right; the deposition was brief, though it was hardly as damaging as he had feared. Trent did use the offending term “murder” to describe Brooke’s assault on the interior of her house, but when asked about her personally, he only said that he found her “immature, and pitifully nouveau”; he said it almost apologetically, glancing at her Isaac Mizrahi patent leather backpack as if to prove his point.
Elle winked at Trent on the way out and promised to call him the next time she was in L.A. She followed Christopher and Brooke to the building lobby, not speaking because nobody else did. When they stepped outside into the sunlight, Brooke sighed with relief.
“You did great,” Christopher answered the question in Brooke’s eyes.
“Thanks.” Brooke swallowed hard. “I can’t believe what he said about my house. You should have heard him rave about my ‘genius’ when I proposed the idea. The mercenary! He even praised my velvet paintings, insisting that they were more than just kitsch, that such paintings were found by Marco Polo in Kashmir, where velvet was first woven by monks in the Middle Ages.”
Elle bristled, her formal allegiance to Brooke uncomfortably set against her natural affection for flamboyant, lively Trent. “Trent did my family’s house in Bel Air,” Elle said.
Brooke shot a surprised look at Elle, as if she hadn’t until that moment been visible.
“You’re from Bel Air?”
Elle nodded. “I wanted to say something to you before, but I felt weird chatting at the deposition, in front of the lawyers and especially Chutney. I went to SC, Brooke, and I took your aerobics class at Mega-Muscle.”
“And lived to tell?” Brooke said, and laughed gleefully.
“Barely,” Elle said. “It was the toughest workout.”
In the flurry of name exchanging that followed, Christopher stepped aside. He watched with approval as Elle and Brooke began to build a firm bridge toward each other on the mortar of common acquaintances, classes, enemies, and memories. Before he could suggest it, Elle had already promised to show Brooke around San Francisco, where Brooke would be moving for the duration of the trial.
They parted at the elevator, Brooke heading for her car in the garage and Elle and Christopher heading for their waiting car. Brooke folded Elle’s phone number on a piece of paper, which she tucked into her tiny turquoise backpack. “Are you sure you don’t mind my staying with you? I won’t be but a day or so until I find a place, but if you don’t have room or something…”
“Of course you can stay,” Elle said firmly. “Underdog, my Chihuahua, will be thrilled to have some company.”
In their car, Elle was surprised to find the driver headed in the opposite direction from the airport.
“I hope you like sushi, Elle. You’ve been working so hard, I thought I’d surprise you and take you to dinner away from Palo Alto, on a school night.”
Elle was equally pleased by Christopher’s recognition of her dedication to the internship.
When they pulled up to Ginza Sushi-Ko, a three-table, twenty-two-seat restaurant located on posh Via Rodeo just above Tiffany, Elle knew that Christopher had put some thought into where to
take her.
Nervous, Elle launched into a story about Everett, a particularly unappealing entertainment lawyer she had a date with just before she started college. He had worked in the Fox Building, where the deposition was taken, so Elle figured it was a timely tale. Elle told Christopher how the boasting associate mentioned at least a dozen times that the Fox Building was where Die Hard was filmed.
“I met him at the office in order to preserve the freedom of having my own car, since Everett had gotten mixed reviews from friends of mine whom he had wined and dined. I didn’t expect a ninety-minute office tour where my date pointed out the desk Michael Jackson danced on, the Montblanc pen Harrison Ford wrote with, the chair Fabio sat in, and other unremarkable celebrity fingerprints. The only area he didn’t point out was the cubicle that served as his office. ‘What do you think of the office?’ he asked at dinner. I told him the office was lovely, but he should apply for a job as a tour guide at Universal Studios.”
Christopher laughed at the story. “You’ve got some tall tales, Elle Woods!”
Chapter Thirty-four
When her alarm clock jingled at 6:30, Elle felt as if she had just fallen asleep. The one thing she could say for property law was that it made great bedtime reading. Fretful and anxious the night before, Elle had only to glance at the phrase “livery of seisin” before she was out like a light.
Elle had plunged headlong into the sea of current events after Eugenia showed her how to search newspaper articles on LexisNexis. Her desk was a dumping ground for littered white papers with VANDERMARK highlighted in bold type. In an expanding “court corner” of her bedroom, piles of dog-eared textbooks and outlines on the will probate procedure were strewn. Whether Brooke won or lost, Elle was dead set on stealing Sarah’s professional turf in the process. She attacked these courtroom manuals night after night, hoping to gain a home-field advantage.
As she got out of bed, she gazed at the court corner listlessly. Some way to spend Valentine’s Day.
It was the first Valentine’s Day that Elle had not looked forward to. Stanford Law School distributed first-semester grades on February 14, a practice known as the Valentine’s Day Massacre. To make matters worse, Sarah would be spending the evening with Warner, and Elle hadn’t even lined up a date.
“Oh, Underdog,” Elle yawned, looking at her beloved pet whom the dog groomer had decorated with a red-and-white heart-trimmed bow. “Today’s the horrible day.” She slipped on her running shoes to take Underdog for a walk.
A short time later Elle dragged herself to class, wishing that she were somewhere…anywhere else. She lingered in the parking lot, gathering resolve in the safety of her Range Rover to enter the halls of Stanford Law. She checked her ruby lipstick in the vanity mirror and adjusted the red bow with white hearts that she had tied in her hair to match Underdog. At least she didn’t look as if Valentine’s Day filled her with dread. The giant red heart on her snug white T-shirt even made her smile.
“Got to keep up appearances,” she said to herself, straightening her red velvet miniskirt as she walked inside. The halls were buzzing with students engaged in the socially ungracious activity of comparing grades. Heading for the student lounge, where law students met to gossip and caffeinate, Elle narrowly missed being blindsided by Aaron.
“I cannot believe it!” Aaron was springing up and down spastically, waving a piece of paper in the air. He blocked Elle’s entrance to the lounge, thrusting the paper, his report card, in front of her face.
“Three point one four! Do you have any idea what this means?”
Elle didn’t know and didn’t care. “Excuse me, Aaron. I’d like to get a cup of coffee.” Elle was looking for Eugenia, a coffee addict and permanent solitary fixture who read in the law lounge.
“My GPA is pi! It’s an absolute mathematical phenomenon!”
“Congratulations, Aaron.” Elle glanced around, seeing no pie or any other dessert offered for Valentine’s Day.
“I just can’t wait until Sidney finds out that I achieved pi! He will be so jealous. This gives new meaning to the Valentine’s Day Massacre!”
Elle gave up on finding Eugenia in the lounge and headed to her mailbox instead.
Two bouquets of flowers had been delivered to the registrar’s office in Elle’s name. A note in her mailbox, stuffed amid a stack of cards, read: “Come to the Registrar! You have flowers!”
Elle beamed, and hurried to the front office. Just maybe, she hoped. At least flowers would soften the blow, since her report card was lurking at the same office.
One bright bouquet was from Trent with a card saying it was nice to see her; the other, strangely, was from Austin, the “darling” plastic surgeon she had dated only once. Yellow roses. “You will find nothing yellow about me except my roses,” read the card. “Signature Texas. Fondly, Austin.” He probably used the same cheesy line every year.
“What was I thinking?” Elle chastised herself. “Like Warner would send me flowers here. Or at all.”
She stuck the report card unopened into her heart-shaped bag and leafed through her cards. Dr. Dan had sent an enormous red heart inscribed with the phrase “Your heart is my business.” He probably had them left over from before the board yanked his license to practice.
Wearily, she glanced inside a card featuring the crew of the starship Enterprise, the same one Sidney sent every year. “Our enterprise awaits,” wrote the Trekkie. “I sent your reel present to your home. Love, Sidney.”
“Our enterprise? Vile.” Elle shivered at the thought of what Sidney could have sent her. Probably a Star Trek home video for them to watch together.
A “secret admirer” card in Eugenia’s handwriting promised to stalk and assassinate all professors at Stanford Law to win Elle’s love. Elle giggled.
Next, she peeled open a pink envelope that contained her last card. “Have a great Valentine’s Day, alone! Sarah.”
“Lovely of her to think of me,” Elle sniped.
Expecting to find Claire and Sarah in the hallway by the registrar’s office rejoicing over their grades, Elle turned quickly in the opposite direction and headed for the phone booth. She figured that she could check her messages. Even though she had left her condo less than an hour ago, she wanted to stay occupied until it was time for class to begin. Long enough to avoid the Grade Question from any uppity law student who might dare to ask her.
To her dismay, Elle found herself walking directly behind the twosome, but when she noticed Sarah was wiping her eyes and sniffling, Elle paused with curiosity.
What could Sarah possibly have to cry about? I’m the one without a date on Valentine’s Day. She leaned against the wall, partially obscured by a plant, and began fishing through her purse as if looking for something. She wanted to hear Sarah.
“Nobody gets kicked out of Stanford. You know that, Sarah,” Claire said in the exasperated tone of one whose consoling advice was falling on deaf ears.
Sarah squeezed her report card in one hand and clutched several crumpled Kleenex in the other. Elle gasped.
“Her grades!” A rush of excitement consumed Elle. Sarah was crying over her grades. She strained her ears to hear more information with the singular concentration of an animal bent on its prey. If Sarah had failed her classes, and if Elle had managed to squeak by, then Elle would have Warner all to herself. It was as if a genie had appeared from a magic lamp and granted her most impassioned wish. Sarah could be gone in a poof of Stanford’s harsh air. Peeking at Sarah, who was blubbering in woe, it seemed too good to be true.
Claire escorted Sarah down the bloodred carpet that had been rolled through the hallway, a devilish tradition that signified the blood of the grade massacre more than the ardent flame of Valentine’s Day. To Elle it was the red of revolution, of victory. Finally, she thought with satisfaction, imagining herself and Warner next semester, linking arms in the very halls she had found such a torture alone. Finally they would be together.
She padded after Sarah and Claire o
n her tiptoes, craning to overhear every word. With Claire’s next comment, Elle’s hopes were dashed into confusion.
“You should be thrilled with your own grades, Sarah! I’m sure you’re at the top of our class,” Claire gushed. “I don’t know anybody whose grades are as high as yours. Be happy for yourself, at least. Warner will find his way.”
Claire paused, and then said with hesitation, “Warner can’t be good at everything, Sarah. Maybe law school just isn’t his thing.”
Sarah shook her head cheerlessly.
“What if it’s just a rumor that Stanford doesn’t kick anyone out? Warner’s barely coping with the shock of his grades now, but if he had to go back to Newport under a cloud like that, the black sheep…” Sarah choked, “I don’t know what would happen to him. To be honest, I don’t know what would happen to us.” Tears began to pour down Sarah’s blotchy cheeks.
Elle’s heart plunged. This was no wish from a genie lamp. It was the worst possible turn of events. It was Warner who was in danger of failing out, and if Elle stayed in school, he would be as far out of reach as ever. Farther. He would be gone, and she’d be left with Sarah reveling at the top of the class. Suddenly her mind jumped to the unopened report card in her red patent leather bag. Maybe she had done no better.
She withdrew the envelope with tentative curiosity, but changing her mind, returned it unopened into her purse. There was no reason to inflict bad news on herself so early in the day. Warner might be a failed law student, but it wouldn’t console him to marry another.
“Your father will still hire him, won’t he, Sarah?”
Sarah shrugged. “I don’t know. He’s not so sure about him. Nobody is, after he dated that mannequin for four years. This won’t help anything. I mean, it’s not like Warner’s ruined,” she said, but she spoke in a hollow voice, as if to convince herself of something she didn’t believe.
“He’ll recover,” Sarah said, folding her arms in a cool, conclusive gesture. “I’d really have to lean on Daddy to hire him, but even if he works somewhere else, that won’t rule out his running for office. He could spin it differently, like he dropped out because law school didn’t serve his ideals,” she said, her eyes darting as if searching for a new plan. Then she stopped walking and turned Claire by her arm to face her.