The Love Wars

by Heller, L. Alison

  the love wars

  the love wars

  L. Alison Heller

  New American Library

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, USA

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  For more information about the Penguin Group visit penguin.com.

  First published by New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, May 2013

  Copyright © L. Alison Heller, 2013

  Readers Guide copyright © Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

  Heller, L. Alison.

  The love wars/L. Alison Heller.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-59323-3

  1. Women lawyers—Fiction. 2. Mother and child—Fiction.

  3. Manhattan (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3608.E453L68 2013

  813’.6—dc23 2012028342

  Designed by Alissa Amell

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  To GWR, for everything

  acknowledgments

  Thank you to the wonderful Elisabeth Weed for believing in me and for being wise and fun in equal measure. And also to Dana Murphy and Stephanie Sun.

  The excellent Kerry Donovan—working with you is so darn enjoyable that I feel like I’m getting away with something. (And I suppose I am because of how much better you’ve made this.) Thank you so much for working your magic in such a collaborative, affirming way. Thanks also to everyone at New American Library: Kara Welsh, Michele Alpern, Anthony Ramondo and Jesse Feldman.

  To my smart early readers for their on-the-money comments: Alice Peck, Diane Simon, Jacqueline Newman.

  For friendship, sustenance, letting me use your home as an office, lending an ear, sound advice, lovingly caring for my kids or otherwise helping me accomplish this dream (and, in some cases, all of the above): Alejandra Lara, Joanna and Kevin Constantino, Lori Dyan, Anne Joyce, Suzanne Myers, Michele Brown, Donna Karlin, Conrad Tree, Sabrina Eliasoph and Laura Dave. (Also, to One Girl Cookies DUMBO for great coffee, and an incredibly inviting writing space with too many treats.)

  To my colleagues and clients from the matrimonial world, past and present, for friendship, humor, humanity and teaching me so much about law, life and New York.

  Thanks to my family: the amazing Grandma Kay and the memory of Grandpa Lester. The generous and sharp Edith Roberts.

  Samantha Heller, the best sister/reader known to woman, for being so supportive in all matters generally and this book specifically. Also, big hugs to the Heller-Bhattacharyya clan—Raj, Kannon and Dashiell—for your open-door policy with what I’m sure will remain the nicest and most convenient writing nook I’ve ever had the pleasure of using.

  The fiercely loving Sue Ann Heller, my constant sounding board on this novel and all else. Your faith in me is a gift, as is your ability to help me digest life. And to Charles Heller—one of the most eloquent writers (and thinkers) I’ve ever known—we miss you every day.

  And, of course, to Zoe, Gigi and Glen. Z&G, you’re the magic in my life and I’m beyond grateful for you both. (Note, though: when I open my computer, I’m not trying to get you to play with me. Truly.) To Glen, thank you for all: your support, pride, solidity, laser-sharp smarts and for always, always being the funniest person I know. Even when it’s the hour of savages at the Cheesecake Factory, you can still crack me up about it. And that’s saying something.

  Promises and pie crust are made to be broken.

  —Jonathan Swift

  Table of Contents

  Part One

  1: Down the Rabbit Hole

  2: The Value of Hard Work

  3: A Forced Chance Meeting

  4: All is Right with the World

  5: In Which I Get it

  6: Fern Walker

  7: A Textbook Case of Parental Alienation

  8: The Girls and the Twirls

  9: Elf and Other Tearjerkers

  10: The Acoustics in the Ladies’ Room

  11: The Finer Points of a Cat Motion

  12: The Health Benefits of Smoking

  Part Two

  13: The Triumph of the Human Spirit

  14: No Sleep Till Brooklyn

  15: Does Anyone Not Like Stars?

  16: A Genuinely Nice Guy

  17: My Visit to Mayberry

  18: Godzilla Vs. Mothra

  19: The Shade of No Boundaries

  20: The Insufferable Heat Wave

  21: WWMD (What Would Machiavelli Do?)

  22: Underground Beatz

  23: Deus Ex Machina

  24: Ms. Longstocking’s Very Adult Adventures

  25: The Devil Wears Hawaiian Print

  26: Brownie Bites are Heaven

  27: Newkirk’s Report

  28: Hiding Out in the Sierra Nevadas

  29: Congratulationshenry

  30: Tfe Mythss of Bleckk Coffeey

  31: Two Points for Honesty

  32: Where Everybody Knows My Name

  33: Ditching the Cricket

  Part Three

  34: A Civilian in My Office

  35: I Scream for Edamame

  36: You Don’t Look Sick

  37: Seriously, What’s Not to Like?

  38: After the Allman Brothers

  39: Surrender, Molly

  40: Robert Walker’s Very Bad Week

  41: The Heart Over the I

  42: Front-Page News

  43: Like the Louvre, If the Guards were Assassins

  44: Wait

  45: Four Months Later

  About the Author

  An opened three-pack of pastel-colored sticky notes triggers the fight in the kitchen. Our brawling, which has already swept through several rooms of the house, focuses on the small things: loose wedding photos; extra toilet paper rolls; the ordinary ceramic soap dish bought in happier times. Never mind that I’ve never set eyes on any of the stuff we’re fighting about, or that I’m not actually part of this couple (or any other, for that matter). I’m here solely for the battle, to guard against, as my boss Lillian delicately put it, any “hell hath no fury burning and slashing shit.”

  Now, though, we’ve taken a sharp veer into the surreal. The kitchen—gleaming white marble countertops and floor tiles, six-burner stove, massive central island—should be the set for some celebrity chef concocting culinary masterpieces. Instead, it’s where Stewart Billings is desperately trying to smuggle sticky notes into a garbage bag filled with his “personal items,” those things he’s allowed to take when he’s booted out of this six-story town house (Central Park adjacent) later this afternoon, pursuant to the terms of the prenuptial agreement he signed seven years ago. The rest of us, two lawyers and his soon-to-be ex-wife, Liesel, watch him with various degrees
of disbelief.

  “Stewart. Sticky notes down,” Liesel says, walking forward with her palm extended.

  “But I bought them,” he says, wiping his nose with his sleeve. “I remember doing it. I was deciding between these and—”

  “Stewart, please. Have you ever really bought anything?” She presses her fingers against her palm, opening and closing them like a fourth-grade teacher commandeering a contraband video game.

  I try to catch the eye of Erika, the other lawyer, but she is suddenly typing feverishly on her BlackBerry, wholly consumed.

  Stewart blinks at me, fixing his features in a puppy dog pout. We’ve been at this for several hours, long enough that he’s pegged me as the softy. Not that I have any real competition in this group.

  Before I can respond, Liesel cuts in. “Megan is my lawyer, Stewart.”

  “Molly.” I offer my third reminder of the day. “My name is Molly.”

  “Whatever. She’s here to protect me from you, you idiot.” She waves a hand at me. “Tell him.”

  I pause, trying to come up with a politic response for Liesel.

  “Hello?” Liesel snaps her fingers in my direction. “Speak. Tell him you’re here to protect me.”

  “I’m here to make sure the move goes smoothly.” I am mortified at the squeak in my voice. “Why don’t you split the sticky pads, maybe each take one and a half?”

  Liesel snorts. “Thanks, Pollyanna, for that crackerjack legal analysis. Stewart, I’m warning you. Put them down.”

  Stewart, displaying a bravery I have not yet seen this morning, defies her, clutching the sticky pads with one hand and continuing to root around the drawer with the other.

  I walk over to Erika and lower my voice. “Maybe one of us should run out to get another packet of notepads? It might help move things along.”

  Stewart, hearing me, drops the notes on the counter. “It’s not about the sticky pads. It’s the principle of this whole thing.” His voice descends from a wail into a forlorn whimper. “The principle of this whole, incredibly fucked-up thing.”

  Oh Lord. Is he crying? Without thinking, I grab a tissue from my pocket and offer it to him. Luckily, Liesel misses my lapse into empathy; she’s too busy staring at Stewart with frosty disdain. “Which incredibly fucked-up thing?” She flashes a harsh smile. “That you slept with your trainer? Or that your gravy train’s ending?”

  Unsurprisingly, Stewart does not look soothed.

  When his sniffles become impossible to ignore, Erika finally looks up from her BlackBerry. “Stewart.” She frowns, taking his arm and leading him out of the kitchen. “Let’s go calm down.”

  Liesel stalks over to the kitchen island, flicks the sticky notes in the open drawer and slams it shut. “I’m going upstairs.” She throws the words over her shoulder, not bothering to look at me.

  “But what about the rest of—”

  Still walking away from me, she cuts me off. “I’ll be in the cat room. Don’t follow me; strangers upset them.”

  The cat room? I don’t even get a chance to ask before Liesel exits the room and heads upstairs, her feet pounding a percussive BOOM on each step.

  part one

  1

  ____

  down the rabbit hole

  My descent down the rabbit hole into Bacon Payne’s matrimonial department began at approximately eleven in the morning two months before moving day at the Billings house. I had finished packing up the last crumbs from my desk in the corporate group (stapler, ficus, opened box of Thin Mints) and, Bankers Box carefully balanced on my forearms, took the elevator to the firm’s thirty-seventh floor.

  When the doors opened, Kim, the matrimonial department’s secretary, was pacing back and forth, clutching a stack of files. I had seen her before; she was one of the smokers that huddled outside the firm’s service entrance, the group that Kevin, my former office mate, had dubbed “the Dementors.” The nickname was spot-on: the smokers clustered outside, miserably sucking down their cigarettes and creating a cloud of perpetual smoke, regardless of weather, time of day or, presumably, their workloads.

  Although she had obviously been waiting for my arrival, Kim barely glanced at me as she shoved the files into my box, squashing my ficus in the process. “Getfamiliar.AnyquestionsaskLiz,” she said, her back already to me as she led me down a hallway and nodded into an office.

  I peered into the empty office. “Is this—,” I started to ask, but Kim was already halfway down the hall.

  My name, Molly Grant, was on the nameplate, so it probably was my office, I reasoned, and the one next door that read ELIZABETH SHER must be Liz’s. I glanced in to see a woman talking into one of those goofy headsets that always made me think of telephone operators in old movies.

  “I know, Bob, I know,” she said, her hands waving as though he were in the room, “but that still doesn’t get to our issues with the holidays. Mmmm-hmmm. Yup. No, so what if she’s Jewish?” She shook her head emphatically, and her blond corkscrews bobbed along. “They celebrated Christmas with the kids every single year. It’s a family tradition. No, no, no—let me finish—Ruby should be able to continue the family traditions too.”

  A few minutes later, Liz, apparently having resolved Ruby’s holiday plans, buzzed my intercom. “Molly,” she said, her shout floating through our common wall a beat ahead of her muffled voice on my speakerphone. “I’m finishing up some calls, but lunch when I’m done?”

  “Okay,” I yelled in the direction of her office.

  “Hi, Bill. Liz Sher,” I heard her say, her voice now sharp with purpose. “Listen, if you’re going to spend that much money on hookers, please use cash, not your credit card. It’s just bad planning.”

  I suppressed a smile. If Bill and Ruby were reliable indicators of our clientele, I would not be bored.

  When I graduated from law school, I thought corporate law sounded perfect: arm’s-length, sophisticated business transactions on behalf of anonymous institutions. It would be, Dean Laylor advised me, the best antidote to what he referred to as “that unfortunate clinic incident.”

  And there was nowhere better to bury myself in the paperwork generated by sterile financial transactions than the corporate group of the Manhattan headquarters of Bacon, Buckley, Worthington & Payne, LLP.

  Home of five hundred impeccably credentialed lawyers, Bacon Payne’s client list included behemoth global financial institutions, cutting-edge technology companies chockablock with newly minted millionaires, and the rulers of several obscenely wealthy foreign nations. Bacon Payne’s plush Park Avenue offices boasted an art gallery, complete with an original Miró, a state-of-the-art gym and a dining room (not cafeteria, mind you). Year after year, its attorneys received the highest compensation in Manhattan.

  The day after I received my offer, Tara Parker, my law school’s director of career services, who clipped around the halls like a championship mall-walker, tracked me down in the library. She leaned her blond-cropped head close to mine and said in a stage whisper, “Well, this is it, honey. Your life is about to start.”

  I met the gaze of her fiercely mascaraed eyes and felt her words in my soul. This must be what I had been working so hard for all of my life.

  Right before she walked away, she patted my arm. “Have you seen their Miró?”

  I shook my head.

  She rolled her eyes. “Exquisite.”

  Five months and twenty-nine days after starting, I recognized that I’d made a mistake. I had just spent an all-nighter summarizing the contents of thirty-six Bankers Boxes filled with mind-numbing financials related to the sale of a German poultry feed company. When I finally presented my memo to a partner named Doug King, he yelled at me for twenty minutes for the unforgivable crime of spelling “document” as “dicament” on page 4.

  I stood stone-faced through his diatribe—even nodding occasionally to affirm a few insults of which Doug King seemed especially proud—but immediately afterward I ducked into a secluded internal stairwell and burst
into tears. My big problem wasn’t just that Doug King (who I later learned was nicknamed Douche King) had called me “lazy,” “stupid” and “the face of Bacon Payne’s lowered hiring standards.” Nor was it that I was exhausted enough to hallucinate tiny brown floating bugs around my peripheral vision. It was that I didn’t give a flying fig about any of the work I had done since starting at the firm.

  At that point, it might have made sense to look for another job, but I dug in my heels. I had to stay. Not for the salary, although Bacon Payne paid more than any other firm, but for what some starry-eyed associate had dubbed the “Payne-ment.” Every Bacon Payne associate who came in as a first-year and made it to his or her fifth anniversary in good standing was given a whopper of a lump-sum bonus, equal to one entire year in salary.

  The second I heard about the Payne-ment, I did some quick calculations—all Bacon Payne associates did at some point—and realized that if I was diligent about paying off my student loans the first five years, I could easily knock off the rest with the bonus. Five years after law school, I could be free to do whatever I wanted.

  To be honest, my fantasy was only planned up to the part where I lassoed the American Dream for the Grant Family by paying off my parents’ home equity line of credit, a loan they’d taken out nine years before to finance my college tuition. I was fuzzy on the details, but with the three of us debt free, I was sure the rest would fall into place and I hung tight, sloughing through three interminably boring years. Until I realized that there was a better way to wait out my sentence at Bacon Payne.

  I’d been on the elevator after yet another all-nighter, desperately wanting a shower—it was one of those sticky July days and I felt incredibly smelly and greasy-haired. Factsination!—the news and information service that was helpfully displayed 24-7 on monitors on our elevators—made me yearn for the days of Muzak. The word of the day, the screen informed me, was paroxysm, as in Mr. Smith had a paroxysm of rage when he saw all the work still on his desk.