The Boys' Club

by Erica Katz

  “You know Matt is considered one of the best M&A lawyers in the country?” Doug asked.

  I put my finger to my lips to shush him, then pointed at Matt and put my hands to my head and fanned out my fingers, as though his head would explode if he heard such a compliment.

  Doug laughed and nodded. He wasn’t nearly as drunk as the rest of us. “You don’t seem surprised that I’ve researched M&A lawyers.”

  “Part of our job is to know the prospective market,” I added seriously, even as I bopped my head to the music. “We would love the opportunity to represent Oculus.”

  He nodded. “I’m going over to get to know these dudes you vouch for.” I watched as he made his way over to Matt, who was sitting on the cushioned stool on the opposite side of our table; he looked over at me with a smile as Doug clearly said something complimentary about me.

  I took a spot on the couch next to Didier, who was staring out at the light show bouncing up from the DJ booth, but he didn’t seem to register my presence. I got up and was pouring myself another vodka cranberry when I felt a tap on my shoulder.

  “Hey, hon.” A voluptuous waitress with long, silky blond hair stood next to me with a petite little pixie of a woman with a tight jet-black bun atop her head next to her. They wore short, tight black dresses, their cleavage almost spilling out from the tops.

  “Oh, we’re okay,” I told them, gesturing to the assortment of mixers on our table.

  “Who are the guys you’re with?” the dark-haired one asked, nodding at our group.

  “What’s their deal?” the blonde asked, sounding a little giddy.

  I poured myself a water to coat my throat, sore from all the screaming over the music. “How do you mean?” I yelled.

  “Are they single?” “Are you with them?” They spoke at the same time.

  I nodded before clarifying. “No. Like, I’m here with them. We all work together. Kinda.”

  “What do you do?”

  My throat was still raw. “We’re lawyers. He’s a banker.” I pointed to my right at Didier, who sat staring at the dance floor.

  “No shit! Good for you, girl!” the tall one said, slapping my shoulder.

  “The balding one and the one with good hair are married. I’m not sure what that guy’s deal is, but I get the sense that he’s in a relationship,” I said, pointing discreetly at Doug, and then indicating Didier. “That one is single.” I figured a little poetic license was called for.

  They both seemed discouraged to hear that Jordan was married, but I cocked my head toward Didier. “This banker is the best catch. His ex-wife is an idiot. He spoiled her rotten. And he’s the nicest . . .”

  They left my side without so much as a word and slipped over to Didier. I turned and battled my way through the crowd toward the ladies’ room.

  “Hey there,” a tall blond man with a deep sunburn said as he stepped into my path, and I stumbled into him before I could stop myself. He put his drink up to his lips and the light caught his wristwatch. I grabbed his hand and pulled it to my face, closing one eye and frowning.

  “Is that the right time?!”

  He tried his best not to laugh at me as he nodded.

  “Shit.” I raced back to our table. “Our flight’s in three hours!” I whined, pulling on Matt’s arm as he ignored me entirely and snorted a line up his nose from the table, leaving a layer of white residue behind. I looked to Jordan for help. Doug Capshaw had his arm around Didier and was speaking to him while Didier nodded, his eyes trained on the waitresses I’d spoken to about him earlier, dancing close to one another right in front of him.

  “Guys! Hello? We have to go!” I yelled over the music. They all looked up for a quick moment before ignoring me again. “This isn’t funny. We’re going to miss our flights.” I had never missed a flight in my life.

  “My assistant will rebook us,” Matt said without looking at me, the red lights emanating from the DJ booth lighting up his face.

  “Wait—I have a plane!” Doug announced, as though it had just occurred to him.

  All of the guys stopped what they were doing and looked at him for a moment before diving on top of him with back pats and sloppy kisses. I exhaled. It was amazing how small your list of worries became when money was no longer an issue.

  I made my way over to Didier. “Up,” I ordered, and he enthusiastically cut me a line with his credit card. I remember nothing after that.

  I awoke in my apartment to the whisper of running shower water and the sound of Sam clattering around in the bathroom. I was lying on top of the covers, wearing only a pair of black underwear. I felt as though I had been in some sort of accident. I wiped the drool pooling around my lower cheek. I should get up, I told myself, but I couldn’t move.

  Sam came out of the bathroom in a cloud of fragrant steam, a towel around his waist.

  “Hey,” he said, rubbing his wet hair with another towel. I grunted a good morning as I cursed myself for not being able to remember my first, and probably only, trip on a private plane. I drifted back to sleep.

  I opened my eyes again to find myself lying on my stomach, cheek flush against our bed, and Sam standing over me with a mug of coffee in his hand, now fully dressed in jeans, a blue button-down, and a blazer, presumably for a meeting. I closed one eye so I could see him more clearly, then opened both.

  “What?”

  “How was Miami?” he asked, a challenge in his tone.

  “Good. I’m so tired,” I said, closing my eyes again.

  “I bet you had fun.” He was angry about something, but I was vacillating wildly between still-drunk and hungover and couldn’t worry too much about what it was. Flashes of deplaning, an Uber SUV, and fiddling with the key in my apartment door bounced around my brain. I remembered tiptoeing into the bedroom and stripping down before falling into bed next to Sam. I didn’t wake him when I came home, I thought. I could pretend the trip was all work. No fun. He couldn’t be mad at me for that.

  “Not really. It was a ton of work. I’m exhausted.” I prayed that he would let me go back to sleep and cupped my forehead in my palm, feeling like my brain might explode if I didn’t. “How was work for you while I was gone?” I mentally pleaded with him to focus on anything but how banged-up I must have looked. I breathed into the pillow and caught a whiff of my own breath as I inhaled. It didn’t smell like morning breath. It smelled like vodka. I cringed and began breathing through my nose.

  “Good. I need to prepare for the final investors meeting next week. I have to brief everybody on potential VC funding and equity dilution, which is obviously a good discussion to need to have. It’s a really big . . .” I needed to shut my eyes for just a moment, hoping he would simply continue speaking, but he didn’t. I peeled my lids apart to prove to him that I was still listening. He shook his head with a disappointed laugh and walked out of the bedroom.

  Just as I was about to close my eyes again, he popped his head back into our bedroom doorway.

  “Oh, it says ‘I’m the worst’ with a fairly detailed drawing of a penis and balls in black marker across your back.” With that, he turned and left the room, and I heard the front door close a minute later.

  “Shit,” I whispered. Jordan. I let my head sink farther into the pillow. Despite the sensation that a metal rod was splitting the two lobes of my brain apart, I burst out laughing. I put my palms to my abdomen and felt my muscles convulsing, before letting out a large sigh to calm myself.

  There was the briefest moment of panic as I wondered if my phone had made it home with me from Miami, but it was responsibly plugged in on my nightstand. I grabbed it and dialed Jordan.

  “Skippyyyyyyyyy,” he croaked into the phone.

  “Uhhhhh.” We groaned at each other for a few minutes. “You’re an asshole, you know? You drew on my back in permanent marker.”

  He paused. “I refuse to apologize for things I have no recollection of doing.”

  “It says ‘I’m the worst’ with a picture of a penis across
my back.”

  Jordan burst out laughing. “Oh my god. I totally remember doing that. I’m sorry, Skip.”

  “Sam saw it this morning,” I told him, laughing now too.

  “Sucks for you, dude! I have Jessica thinking I worked the whole time.”

  “Are you making it in to the office today?” I asked, hoping the answer was no and I could spend the Friday in bed. I knew that there was no way Matt would be making the trek in from Westchester.

  “Zero chance. Can you just look at the term sheet Matt sent around this morning?”

  “Yup, will do,” I said and hung up. I spent two hours on it before sending it back to Jordan, then stared at my in-box, which was reasonably quiet today. I turned on my side to go back to sleep for a bit, but the adrenaline from the weekend got me up and into the shower. I emerged clean and dizzy from the heat and checked my email again to see that only a few administrative emails from the firm had dripped in. Matt and Jordan had probably gone back to sleep as well.

  The day stretched out like an impossibly long blank canvas before me. As I sat on the corner of the bed, I searched the plank wood floors for dust and the ceilings for cobwebs, but saw none. The cleaning lady we had once a week would be in Monday anyway, and she’d also do all my laundry from the Miami trip. Food shopping was pointless because I’d inevitably eat at my desk all week, and Sam liked to buy his own food. I was too hungover for the gym. I opened my phone to review my texts—the first twenty text conversations were all to and from Sam, my parents, and Klasko people. My friends from college hadn’t been in touch in weeks—they had grown tired of my delayed responses. It was just too easy not to respond to people in different cities, especially when their questions weren’t time-sensitive like the ones from work. I breathed in deeply, trying to suppress the uncomfortable feeling that I had no life outside of the office, and refreshed my work email again.

  This time, I was relieved to see a few new messages from Matt asking for some follow-up items to send to clients we’d seen and potential clients we’d met in Miami. The tightness in my chest dissipated as I opened my laptop and dove into the tasks at hand, welcoming the calm of purpose and productivity.

  Part IV

  Attempted Closing

  An attempt to conclude the merger process and legally transfer ownership through signing and recording of all documents.

  Q.Was your relationship with any of your colleagues ever sexual in nature?

  A.[Mr. Abramowitz] That is beyond the scope of the trial. My client’s relationship with Gary Kaplan is the only relevant relationship here.

  Q.The question of your actions with clients and colleagues is highly relevant to the scope of the trial and provides valuable insight to the veracity of your accusations as well as motivation for truthfulness or lack thereof.

  A.Klasko, like all large law firms, is a high-stress environment. When attorneys aren’t working, they often find outlets for their stress. Often in substances. Sometimes in one another.

  Q.Could you please be more specific?

  A.My relationships with many of my colleagues changed over the course of my first several months at the firm, be it through regular evolution of a friendship or a rumored sexual relationship or, in one case, an actual one.

  Q.Could you please provide some specific examples of the latter two? The rumored sexual relationship and the actual one?

  Chapter 14

  “Come to the associate happy hour tonight! It’ll be fun!” Carmen stood in my office, arms folded over her chest. I readied my polite excuse. “Free booze! You can’t turn that down.” The firm believed that we needed to know each other personally to work well together, and so our bar tab was picked up each Thursday at the bar across the street to encourage us to get drunk with one another. “Plus, the older associates are really cool. You should meet them! The ones you haven’t already gallivanted around Miami with.” She overshot her attempt at a smile, and bared her teeth ever so slightly for just a moment. I should have told her I was going to Miami, I thought, so she didn’t have to hear it from somebody else.

  “I was going to tell you—”

  Carmen shook her head to stop me. “I’m happy for you,” she assured me, sounding convincing. “Come tonight!” I found it remarkable how quickly people forgave me when I didn’t apologize. Her placid face no longer betrayed underlying resentment. Perhaps she was angrier that I hadn’t told her than jealous that I’d gone. I watched her, trying to trust her. But on some level, I knew that Carmen was masterful at presenting herself exactly as she intended to.

  “I’ll come to the first one in the new year. Seriously, I’ll kick my year off right and start showing up to these things. But we have the holiday party at the end of the week, and I cannot . . .”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Who knows how busy you’ll be next week, let alone next year!”

  I pulled up my Outlook calendar and looked up at Carmen with a confirmatory grin. “Fine.”

  * * *

  I squeezed in between two large men in suits standing right in the entrance to the bar, who were too engaged in a heated conversation about a potential trade war to pay me much attention.

  “Ahhhh! You’re here!” Carmen said, hugging me. She was standing with Kevin and two men I’d seen around the office. “I totally thought you were going to bail.” She turned back to the men around her. “Guys, this is Alex—I was just telling you about her.” She looked at me. “I told them you were my best friend at the firm!” I smiled back at her and then at them.

  The two guys, who I guessed were fourth-year associates, maybe, looked like twins whose mother dressed them in different-colored shirts to help tell them apart. One wore a blue collared shirt, the other a pink collared shirt. Other than that, they looked identical: pale-skinned, with chests indicating long hours at the gym (where did they find the time?), close-cropped dark hair, and smooth, clean-shaven faces. They were good-looking, but in a completely unremarkable way—barely distinguishable from the other men in the bar.

  As I took them in, they both scanned me up and down. I squirmed under their gaze, but smiled.

  I then turned my attention to Kevin, who now blended in too. His no-longer-gelled hair now fell easily over his brow and into his cartoonishly—but like one of those very attractive male cartoon characters from Disney movies—large brown eyes. His loosely knotted pink tie rested easily on his chest, which was far more defined than it had been in September. I didn’t know when he had found time for the gym either, but he looked good.

  “Hi!” I hugged him. Seeing him had spurred nostalgia for my first-day jitters, which now seemed so very long ago.

  A warm smile spread across his face as we released from the hug. “Hey.”

  “So, you’re working for Jaskel?” Pink Shirt asked, while Blue Shirt gulped at his drink. I felt an odd vibe coming from them.

  Why were they staring at me? Were they trying to flirt? Or had Carmen told them that Matt had invited me to Miami? I couldn’t even tell if they were impressed or judging me. Or is it that I have something stuck between my teeth? The tiny hairs on the back of my neck stood up as I ran my tongue along my teeth.

  “Yup!” Screw it. It didn’t matter what they thought of me—I knew how to deal with these kinds of guys, how to win them over. The past few months had taught me nothing if not that. “Guys, I have some catching up to do. Let’s get me drunk!” I commanded, pointing a finger in the air.

  “Yaaaaaaas.” Carmen threw a solitary fist toward the ceiling, and the three boys grinned. I peered into their short glasses. “What are we drinking?”

  “Johnnie Walker Blue,” Pink Shirt responded.

  “Oh no no no,” I said, then shook my head and pursed my lips. “Gross. I’m going to stick to vodka.”

  Blue Shirt protested. “It’s good! Try it!” he said, shoving his glass at me and looking briefly down at my chest, which was luckily covered by a collared shirt I’d buttoned right up to the neck.

  I felt Kevin tense, about
to interject on my behalf, but I leaned into Blue Shirt’s glass playfully, inhaled, and then scrunched up my nose. “No way. That smells like battery acid.”

  The Shirts both laughed as Kevin relaxed back on his barstool. “The most delicious battery acid in the world,” Pink Shirt said, holding his glass up to me and taking a long sip.

  “I didn’t get your names.”

  “Scott.”

  “James.”

  “Scott. James,” I repeated as I pointed, knowing I wouldn’t remember them.

  “Excuse me!” Kevin said as he hailed a passing waitress. “Can we get my friend here a drink?”

  “I’ll have a vodka rocks, please,” I said. She looked at my wrist.

  “Are you with Klasko?” I nodded. “You’ll need a wristband, honey. I’ll bring you one with your drink. What kinda vodka?”

  “Tito’s, please.”

  She took off toward the bar as I looked around the room.

  The bar was clean and casual, with dark wood floors and deep red leather booths, high-top bar tables, and steel stools. Other than a male bartender, the staff was entirely female, and all dressed in black Lycra. I scanned the crowd of maybe forty people, vaguely recognizing most of the faces—though I had never exchanged words with the vast majority of them. There were a few exceptions. I spotted Derrick, who stood heads above his shorter comrades, taking shots at the bar, and Jordan perched on a barstool, surrounded by his fellow senior M&A associates. As usual, he was typing furiously on his phone, brow furrowed.

  When the waitress reappeared with my drink, it shifted my attention back to my immediate surroundings.

  “Cheers,” Kevin said, extending his glass. I clinked with the other four glasses, then took a long, slow sip with my eyes closed. When I opened them, they were all watching me, probably stupefied by the length of my first swig.

  I grinned sheepishly. “Here we go, boys,” I said, and laughed.

  “I like this one,” Blue Shirt said to no one in particular. That’s because you like anything that flirts with you. I felt the warm liquor hitting my empty stomach—I hadn’t had time to eat since breakfast—and attempted to will it into my bloodstream. I pulled out my phone to check my work email one last time, sensing I’d be committing malpractice if I answered any messages once I’d chugged this drink, and saw a text from Sam on my home screen.