The Love Wars

by Heller, L. Alison

  Twenty minutes ago, when Everett started the call—which has nothing to do with any of the mindless assignments he has pelted me with—I tried tiptoeing out of the office. He had put the call on hold and motioned to the chair, telling me to “sit down, Molly, and wait until I’m done.”

  “Oh, I’ll come back as soon as you’re done. I have to—”

  “Sit down. I’ll be off soon.”

  But of course he wasn’t.

  I am certain Everett doesn’t like me, so it never ceases to amaze me how much time he makes us spend together. Now that I am starting to get more substantive work, this togetherness is torture. Every hour I spend with Everett translates into an hour that I will have to stay late at the office, catching up on actual, billable work.

  From my peripheral vision, I see someone stick a head in the doorway. It’s Kim. “Lilliannow.”

  Everett jumps to his feet. “Hey, man, Jim, gotta run, talk soon.” He slams down the receiver, rummages through the piles of paper on his desk to find a notepad and races out of the door, stopping only to turn back to me. “I’ll find you after.”

  “Okay,” I say, silently debating whether I should hide from him in the library or an empty conference room. Before I can decide, Kim nods at me.

  “Sheshouldcometoo.”

  Curious, I follow Everett and Kim next door to Lillian’s office, which anchors the southwest corner of the floor and is the size of two partners’ offices combined. There are huge windows, with city views, and despite its grandeur, Lillian has prioritized the room’s comfort. “Make my guests feel cradled,” I have imagined her directing, pinning the interior decorator’s gaze with the sharpness of her own. And, like everyone else in Lillian’s life, the decorator had complied. It is a place where clients can, over a cup of hot tea, be lulled into telling their deepest secrets.

  Two silver floor lamps with ecru lampshades emit a cozy yellow glow. A plush ivory throw rug cuddles the industrial gray carpet that covers the rest of the law firm. The walls have tasteful prints with safe illustrations of pretty, nonthreatening things found in nature: beaches and mountains, flowers and leaves. Opposite Lillian’s big desk are two guest chairs with garnet-colored seats and backs, and behind them is a beige suede couch with deep cushions and a garnet chenille throw blanket. Hope occasionally naps there while pulling all-nighters and swears by its comfort.

  Lillian sits at her desk peering over chic circular glasses at some papers. She looks up when we come in and pushes her glasses to the top of her head, where they teeter precariously on her expertly blown-out hair.

  “Molly.” She nods to the chair and I sit. “Are you free for lunch after I finish up with Everett?”

  “Of course.”

  Lillian turns to Everett, unsmiling. “Bruce at the Bar Group called. He didn’t get the materials.”

  Everett turns red. “I thought we had until the sixteenth. Your talk’s not until the twenty-third, right?”

  “Well, he needs them now, Everett. Now.”

  He stands uncertainly.

  She waves her hands toward the door. “Go. Do it. All the materials, six copies and the outline.”

  Everett scurries out of the room and Lillian rolls her eyes at me. “Why do boys always need so much direction?” She grabs a fancy-looking olive green bag and a winter white jacket from the coatrack by her door. “I was thinking the Modern.”

  “Okay, great. Let me just get my things.”

  I had been to the Modern my first year for a summer associate event called “Wine, Dine and Refine” that involved a multicourse tasting menu, several rounds of a delicious drink that mixed Pimm’s and apricot liqueur and a tipsy, loopy private tour around the museum and sculpture garden. I round the corner toward my office wondering whether they still have the house-cured salmon on the menu. It had been delicious, delicate and velvety and—

  I walk right into a mass of French blue cotton, my head smacking against someone’s arm. I step back. It’s Henry Bennett, the world’s most unfriendly associate.

  We do that thing where we face each other and, like idiots, step in the same direction and then, trying to remedy that, step in unison in the other direction. Even though the hallway is more than wide enough for us to go around each other, we can’t seem to get unstuck from blocking each other’s path.

  I smile. “Care to dance?”

  He stops and folds his arms over his chest. “Maybe master walking before you take on dance?”

  “I was just joking.”

  He nods, unsmiling. “Funny.”

  “Sorry,” I try again, although he probably doesn’t deserve the effort. “I have a lunch with Lillian—my first.”

  “Ooooooh.” He raises his shoulders and claps his hands, as though I’ve told him that I’m going to skip to the American Girl store over lunch and pick out a new doll best friend. “By all means, after you. I had no idea you were on such important business. Godspeed.”

  He’s jealous. Lillian doesn’t seem to have the same level of camaraderie with Henry that she does with Liz, Hope and Rachel. I don’t blame her; his personality doesn’t exactly encourage interaction.

  __________

  At the restaurant, Lillian hands her unopened menu to the server and orders a microgreen salad, dressing on the side, and an iced tea. I mimic her order, reluctant to rock the boat by taking the time to review the menu. So much for the salmon.

  Lillian looks at me. “Just a salad? That must be why you’re a toothpick.”

  “Oh, please, Lillian, just look at yourself.”

  She beams at me, reveling in our thinness.

  I am slim, but normally so—I have two lanky parents and, at least before starting at the firm, got regular exercise—not much of a mystery there. When I first started at Bacon Payne, though, I was stunned at the number of women who, upon initially meeting, felt it appropriate to remark on my size instead of, say, inquiring politely how I was finding the city, or asking what made me go into corporate law. A few even went a step further and, having established that I was on the skinny side, asked in effect how I had done it. By the end of the first month, I was tempted to tell them my secret was McDonald’s with a colonic chaser each morning, followed by a public recitation of the poem “Jabberwocky,” just to see if it would elicit a knowing smile. “Ah, the Egg McCarroll Method,” they’d agree.

  Instead, I eventually started pointing out how ridiculous it was for someone with the build of a greyhound to be making such a fuss about my frame. Based on the pleased responses, I knew I had stumbled onto the right reaction.

  “So, tell me, how is everything so far?” Lillian asks.

  “Everything’s great. And everyone’s so help—”

  Her phone rings and she holds up her index finger as she presses it to her cheek.

  “Lillian Starling. Oh, yes, hello. Tell her I’ll call her back after three.” She taps the end call button with a flourish. “Sorry. Where were we?”

  “I was say—”

  “Oh, great bag, Molly.”

  “This? Thanks.” I look at my red tote. I am pretty sure roughly ninety percent of the female associates at Bacon Payne, as well as thousands of office workers everywhere, own a similar bag. It has handy internal pockets but isn’t winning any design innovation awards.

  “You know Theora Fredericks gave me a rouge Hermès leather tote bag that looks pretty similar to that. She was my first big client.”

  I had bought my bag at a boutique on Columbus Avenue during my first year, after reading about the store in a New York magazine blurb. I had circled the shelves for several weeks, initially fleeing whenever the pixie-haired salesclerk interrupted my browsing to offer guidance. Eventually, though, I convinced myself that I needed a bag from this store—a real New York boutique—to legitimize my big-city experience. The least expensive one in the shop was four hundred dollars, which still seemed outrageous, but it was red, instead of black, which made me feel bold. Splash of color aside, Pixie Hair was disappointed. “Nice
for the office,” she had said with a shrug, as though offering consolation. The bag is a far cry from Hermès.

  “You represented her?” Theora Fredericks recently passed away, but she had been one-half of the power couple that owned the boutique chain of Fredericks Hotels. Theora and her husband had divorced and reconciled decades ago, but all the newspapers were dragging out the story again as part of her obituary.

  “I did. I had a nice little practice before, lots of bankers and professionals, but that was my first case where the whole city was watching to see what happened.”

  “How did you get the case?”

  “I had represented her oldest friend from childhood and done a great job, so she referred Theora to me.”

  Our salads arrive and Lillian pours a dollop of dressing on hers.

  “Was it stressful?”

  “It was terrifying, but I loved every minute of it. And after my name got in the papers, the phones started ringing off the hook.”

  “Wow, what a break.”

  Lillian fixes her sharp dark eyes on me. “Oh, no, Molly. I know you know the value of hard work, so don’t tell me you really think that. I busted my ass for that moment.” She pours the rest of the dressing on the salad and swishes it around with her fork. “It’s like everything in this world. The winning formula is singular focus and wanting it more than anything. Period.”

  She continues, “I’d done a lot to prepare for Theora Fredericks. I put myself through City College and New York Law School. I slaved away at Myers Greenspan and then when it merged with Bacon Payne, I billed twenty-four hundred hours a year so that I wouldn’t be pushed to the curb like the other associates I came in with. I treated every single client like the most important one, so that when one of them knew a Theora Fredericks, I was right there, the natural choice.”

  I nod and do some quick math in my head. Billing twenty-four hundred hours translates into billing well over forty hours a week, which means working an estimated sixty or seventy hours per week, fifty-two weeks a year. Not much time left over to spend with family members. I know from office gossip that Lillian has a grown daughter whom she never mentions and three divorces under her belt. Husband number four is a Columbia biology professor named Roger Fields, whom I had met briefly one evening when he came to pick her up for an event. Tall and lanky, he has flaky skin and an absentminded, laconic manner that contrasts with Lillian’s intense energy. Purportedly, he is the world’s leading expert on elongated insects. I can easily imagine him contentedly spending his days with praying mantises and grasshoppers.

  “And we all have to have each other’s backs. No one understands what it takes to make it except those of us going through it.” Lillian grabs a roll from the middle of the table, tears off a bite-sized piece and dabs it in the sterling silver bowl to soak up the remains of the dressing. “This dressing is delicious. Don’t you think? I taste—a cheese? Parmesan? Pecorino? Can you tell?”

  I dab a piece of lettuce in the dressing and put it in my mouth thoughtfully.

  Lillian grabs my arm. “Molly, I’m so glad you’re on my team. You’re going to fit right in, I can tell.”

  3

  ____

  a forced chance meeting

  Two months after starting in the matrimonial group, I’ve taken my first Saturday out of the office. After sleeping in, I meet my best friend, Duck (née Caroline Duckworth), and her husband, Holt, at a Chinatown restaurant that’s equally inconvenient to their home in Brooklyn and my Hell’s Kitchen apartment.

  “I can’t help it. It looks so bad but it tastes so good,” Holt says, reaching for the gelatinous pumpkin custard. He successfully spears a rectangular piece with his chopsticks, bringing the quivering mass up to his mouth and chomping off half.

  “So, Molly,” Duck says, “our Aspen trip is definitely on. We rented a house.”

  “A sick house.” Holt’s mouth is full of food. “You should come out.”

  “Thanks, but no way I can take time off now.”

  “Not now. In February. Who goes to Aspen in November?”

  I let out a low whistle. “You rented a whole house in prime ski season? How much does that cost?”

  Holt, a bond trader at Goldman Sachs, does his best impression of a discreet smile. “A fair amount. But it’ll be totally worth it.”

  “Is Duck planning on skiing?” I laugh. “Because it might be worth it just to see that show.”

  When Duck and I met during freshman orientation at college, she was probably the thirtieth person that asked where I was from. She was definitely the first who hugged me after I told her, though. “Oh, me too, me too, fellow Tar Heel,” she had said, “and between you and me, it makes me a little nervous to be surrounded by all of these Yankees.”

  Of course Duck, whose daddy was a banker in Charlotte, was from what I thought of as the Real South, where they actually used terms like Yankee. In Duck’s North Carolina, the girls were butter blond, giggly and befrocked; the guys were tall and broad, with perfectly broken-in baseball caps. There were debutante parties, gently twanged y’alls, large stately homes, beach houses and sweeping magnolia trees. My North Carolina was much less frilly: vacations working at Cheddar and Better, the kitchen shop that my parents own; uniforms of jeans, sweats and hoodies; drives into Chapel Hill to hang out at a record shop or on the UNC campus; and sneaking into Cat’s Cradle to hear an under-the-radar hipster band.

  But there was something comforting about our common roots when compared to the East Coast kids at our tiny college in western Massachusetts who knew nothing about hush puppies, real barbecue or the art of superficial courtesy.

  Duck smiles. “The beauty of Aspen is that you don’t need to ski. There’s plenty to buy there.”

  “You said you’d take a lesson.” Holt points his chopstick at her.

  “I said I admire people who take lessons,” says Duck.

  As they discuss the finer points of ski instruction, I look at the table next to us. Six couples are enjoying a rowdy meal, all of them in their late twenties or early thirties. Before the others had joined them, one couple—she with short red hair and dangly earrings and he with an eggplant-colored shirt—was alone at the table, sipping tea and arguing intensely. As I waited for Duck and Holt to arrive, I’d caught snippets of their fight, which, based on how many times I heard the terms “shopping addiction” and “cheapskate assholery,” was about finances.

  When their friends arrived, Eggplant and Dangly Earrings both pasted smiles on their faces, but now midway through the meal, Dangly Earrings is turned away from Eggplant, and although Eggplant’s hand rests on the back of her chair, his fingers curl up defensively, warding against contact with her shoulder. I feel a twinge in the pit of my stomach for them, as though I know exactly where they’re headed. Even though I’m new to this work, there’s something about dissecting broken marriages every day that alters your perspective.

  As their whole group noisily files out of the place, Duck looks at me and back at them. “You checking out her boots? Gorgeous, right?”

  I sigh. “I was actually wondering if being a divorce lawyer has already curdled my romanticism.”

  “What romanticism?” Duck snorts. “When was the last time you even had a crush on anyone?”

  Duck’s question is hanging in the air, but I’m focused on a large group that’s filing into the restaurant’s entrance, milling around the long entry hall as they wait for their table. I scan the group the way I usually do, only this time, he’s there. He’s actually freaking there. Caleb Frank. The timing is straight out of a romantic comedy, although Caleb would be a disaster as a leading man. He’d probably be seducing the key grip when he was supposed to be rushing to the airport to stop the female lead from moving to Chicago.

  It’s not a complete coincidence to spot Caleb here, though. I did innocently recommend this restaurant to Duck and Holt after Caleb tweeted last year that it was one of his “faves.” And it is my fourth visit to the place since reading the t
weet.

  Caleb and I were over in college. And that was that. Well, there was a handful of meaningless times in the years following graduation, yes, but those were minor little aftershocks. One recent night, though, alone at my desk at Bacon Payne, I had idly typed his name into a search engine. Jackpot! Pages and pages popped up, detailing all the fantastic things that Caleb Frank had been up to in the past four years while I had been stuck in document-review hell. It was pure masochism, a one hundred percent guarantee of feeling crappy, so of course, I kept at it, becoming increasingly obsessed. Which is why I haven’t shared this with Duck. She will point out to me twenty different reasons why my interest in Caleb is unfounded. And she will be right.

  Now that I see him, I realize this and I want to disappear. My expression must betray my distress, because Holt freezes midbite and Duck’s head starts swiveling around like a drunken top. “What?” she says.

  “Don’t look over there.” I speak without moving my mouth, as though we’re hiking and I’ve just spotted a bear on the trail. “It’s him.”

  “Him?” Duck, of course, does not realize that in my world the generic pronoun refers to Caleb Frank; she probably thinks I’m having Joan of Arc–style visions.

  “Caleb Frank.”

  Duck and I exchange nervous looks. Should we leave? Hide under the table? Strike a fabulously casual pose? Our eyes are still locked when Caleb saunters over to the table. “Good to see you two are still inseparable.”

  Unfortunately, Caleb looks even better in the flesh than he does on the Web. Since I’ve known him, some secret ingredient has mixed with the golden brown waves, the half smirk, the chicken pox scar on his temple, elevating him from appealing to irresistible.

  “Hi, Caleb.” I somehow manage to sound casual.

  “Mol-lee Grant.” He dips his head in greeting. “How long has it been?”