The Opposite of Love

by Julie Buxbaum

  “Maybe you are holding out for something that doesn’t exist,” she says.

  “It’s not that I am looking for someone better, or anything like that. He’s the best. But he doesn’t understand me.” I know I sound full of lame excuses, but I can’t bring myself to say what I really want to. I ate him, Kate, and he tasted just like chicken. I ate him, Kate, and I barely felt a thing. I keep these thoughts to myself, because I know I don’t make any sense.

  “I guess the truth of the matter is this isn’t about Andrew at all,” I say instead.

  “No. No, I don’t think it is,” she says, and the look she gives me now is identical to the one Andrew gave me last night; it looks something like pity. She crosses the room and kisses me on my forehead, a gesture only she can get away with. No condescension or judgment, just a move to bring the mood back to level. Kate never leaves a wake; instead, she makes sure to smooth things out.

  “All right, we’ll talk more about this later. I’ve got to get back to work,” she says. Kate is three years senior to me and is aiming to make partner next year. If she does—and she will if there is any justice in this world—Kate will become the second woman litigation partner in the two-hundred-year history of APT. I, on the other hand, was told at my last review that I need to work on my dedication to the firm.

  “By the way, be careful, Em. Avoid Carl today at all costs. He is looking for someone to work on the new Synergon water case.”

  “Please, please tell me you’re making that up. I already have a meeting scheduled with him this afternoon.”

  There is no doubt about it, the look in her eyes now is definitely pity. I am screwed. Day one at APT, we were taught by the senior associates that there were only three things you needed to avoid at the firm in order to survive: Synergon, Carl MacKinnon, and the Chinese take-out place on the corner.

  “It gets worse. Carisse has already been assigned to it, so she’ll be the most senior person under Carl.”

  Now, I like to think that I don’t hate anyone in this world, but that would be a big, fat lie. I hate Carisse. Even Kate, who does not hate anyone, makes an exception for her. Carisse is one of those women who should be kicked out of the Sisterhood. Her transgressions, beyond sleeping with various married partners, include playing games with her underlings, such as Passing the Blame and Do My Work for Me and I’ll Take the Credit, Thank You. She’s famous for saying things like Wow, you look terrible/tired/bloated, or congratulating you on your nonexistent pregnancy. Although she is only two years ahead of me at the firm, just another cog in the associate ranks, she commands as if she is managing partner. I sometimes think that if I could murder her and get away with it, it would not be hard to pull the trigger. The world would be a much better place without her.

  “Sorry, Em,” Kate says, and walks out the door. I look down at my notepad and notice a new set of doodles. I have been drawing little daggers.

  At noon, I walk into Carl’s office in what I hope is a defiant way. Maybe my unfriendly demeanor will change his mind about assigning me to the case. I channel Marge. She brings me strength in times like these.

  Carl sits behind an enormous mahogany desk that is empty except for a sleek flat-screen monitor. Although not a tall man, his chair is pumped up to what seems like ten feet off the ground. I notice that his guest chairs rest about two inches from the floor. He is on the phone, and he signals me to enter with a flick of his wrist.

  I sit on the minuscule seat. The chair thing actually works. I feel like a five-year-old getting scolded in the principal’s office. Impressively framed degrees line the wall, and the names jump out. Princeton. Wharton Business School. Harvard Law School. Could he possibly have gone to all three? An award from Save the Children hangs beside them; apparently, Carl was Donor of the Year in 1994, 1999, and 2005. A picture of him hugging a skinny African kid shares the frame.

  Carl stares at me, evaluates me, while he sweet-talks a client on the phone. I cradle a legal pad against my chest to avoid him taking a peek at my cleavage. He’s the type who somehow thinks it’s perfectly acceptable at one moment to scream at an associate and in the next, if the associate happens to be wearing a skirt, to put his hand on her thigh. Rumor has it that though his partnership shares have been cut more than a few times for sexual harassment, he’ll never be fired, because he could take too many big clients, like Synergon, with him. There is also firm lore that he once threw the annotated New York Civil Procedure and Laws Rule Book at an associate’s head.

  That had to hurt.

  Oh, and did I mention his pregnant wife? She’s expecting twins.

  Usually, if I know I will be meeting with Carl, I wear my dowdiest clothing, leave my makeup at home, and pull my hair back in an old-lady bun. I like to believe this is why he has never hit on me. Of course, I am firmly anti–sexual harassment, but I have to admit that I worry about the fact that my costume works so well; I’m the only woman in the office he has never made a pass at.

  “So, I am assigning you to the new Synergon water case. It will be you, me, and Carisse, though as the most junior person, I expect you to do most of the legwork on this one,” Carl says, after he hangs up the phone. There it is. My stomach drops. The fact I already knew it was coming does not cushion the blow.

  “I expect you to devote one hundred and ten percent of your time to this. It requires all the manpower we have and is a great opportunity to show your dedication to the firm. I expect that there will be no incidents like this weekend?” I nod, and Carl sniffs the air as if he smells something bad.

  “Of course, Carl. I’m sorry about that.” The apology slips out before I can stop it, and I am ashamed of myself for giving in so easily. I might as well just give him a blow job and get it over with.

  “All right, now here are the details. Synergon is being sued by about fifty different families in Arkansas state court. Basically, we are defending against a bunch of Erin Brockovich–type cases, though fortunately that bitch isn’t involved this time. You know, she looks nothing like Julia Roberts.”

  “Oh,” I say.

  “All these poor people in the middle of nowhere Arkansas have gotten cancer and are growing third eyes and the like, and they are claiming it’s because we have been dumping chemicals in the water.”

  “Is there evidence of dumping?”

  “Yeah, Synergon has been dumping petrochemicals in the Caddo River for over fifty years. They just assumed none of the WT who live nearby would be smart enough to sue.”

  “WT?” I ask.

  “White trash. But, honestly, dumping does not necessarily equal cancer. Yeah, they have been spilling chemicals, but no one has proven this is why these people are getting sick.”

  I look up at Carl and see a small smile playing at the corners of his lips. He enjoys this, I realize, this squashing of the little guy. Carl must have been pantsed daily in high school, been beaten up in the cafeteria, perhaps even swirlied. There is just no other way to explain his level of evil. His aimless revenge.

  “Really, this case is simply the plaintiffs’ bar trying to squeeze some more money out of corporate America,” he says.

  “But if there was dumping—”

  “Do I really need to repeat this? Write this down, Emily. Dumping does not necessarily equal cancer. Dumping equals dumping. Not cancer. Got it?”

  “I guess…”

  “So here is our plan of attack, though I will leave the details and the heavy lifting to you. We are going to go A Civil Action on their asses. Did you read that book?”

  “Yup, it was required my first year of law school.” I don’t add that it was for an ethics class and that the point was to teach us how not to practice law.

  “Good, good. Here is the big picture. First, we get some expert reports from a few scientists who will say that there is no causal connection between the chemicals and cancer. Which, really, I don’t think there is.” Carl looks down at his notes. “There is a list of experts Synergon always uses. We’ll also serve the
plaintiffs with tons of discovery requests and file as many motions as we can get away with to ratchet up their legal costs. Synergon has piles of money to throw at this, but the other side clearly doesn’t.

  “After we win on summary judgment, which we will because they can’t prove a damn thing, then comes act three. We sue them for our attorneys’ fees. We probably won’t get ’em, but it’s still a win-win for us. Synergon is impressed by our aggressive stance, we get to bill more hours, and best of all it teaches people not to mess with Synergon.”

  He smiles again, and I swear I see his chest puff out.

  “Get started drafting the first set of discovery requests immediately. I expect them on my desk tomorrow morning. Also, plan on traveling to Arkansas a lot over the coming months. Get some decent luggage. And one more thing.” He pauses and waits for me to catch his eye.

  “Nice suit, Emily.” And with a wink, I am dismissed from his office. Somehow he leaves me no doubt that he just pictured me naked.

  When you take a job as a litigator at a large law firm, you know that you are selling your soul. Anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is either lying or fooling themselves. But, until this moment, I had always thought about it as selling my life, and not really my soul. I knew going in that the job would require all of my time, leaving little for anything resembling a social life. As an associate, canceling plans, doctors’ appointments, and vacations all comes with the territory. Most of us spend Friday afternoons keeping our fingers crossed, praying that this week will be the exception, that a partner will not drop work on our desks that invariably “needs” to be done by Monday morning.

  But soul-selling aside, being an associate is still a pretty good deal. Though most days I feel overworked and understimulated, the salary leaves me enough room to pay off my gigantic law-school loans and to rent my own studio in the Village. Though the space is only four hundred square feet, in Manhattan, where people sell their organs for an apartment, having my own little corner carved out feels luxurious.

  I start looking over the complaints that have been filed against Synergon. I read about some of the plaintiffs, impoverished people from a tiny little town that no one has ever heard of: Caddo Valley, Arkansas. Population: 565. The first complaint is from the Jones family, and they are suing because their mother, Jo-Ann, died from acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Mr. Jones has five kids to raise alone now, all between the ages of two and nine. They live .25 miles from the Caddo River, and Jo-Ann is the seventh person in Caddo Valley to get the diagnosis. This gives the town a cancer rate five hundred times the national average.

  While I consider the details of the complaint, I sit on the forty-fifth floor of a high-rise building smack in the middle of New York City. My office is a large box constructed from gleaming steel and glass, a lofty perch, with a view of the city’s grid of organized chaos. The only thing I have in common with the Joneses is that my mother, too, died of cancer. That suddenly doesn’t seem like all that much.

  A wave of shame passes over me when I realize that this is my job. This is what I am paid to do. I get a check every two weeks, a 401k, and health-care benefits (which cover me should I ever get cancer), and in exchange, I will spend this evening, and the next six months, manufacturing ways to prevent Synergon from redistributing a tiny portion of its wealth to fifty families that need, and deserve, the help. I wonder what Andrew, who paddles people back to life every day in the E.R., who makes the world a better place, would think about the case, but I push him out of my head. I then wonder briefly, like a flicker, what my mother, whose own hair fell out strand by strand and whose breasts were carved out of her chest, would say if she knew who I have grown up to be. I don’t want to know. Instead, I click over to the American Cancer Society Web site and make a hundred-dollar donation, a small penance, nothing in comparison to the fifty million at stake in the litigation.

  And then I begin drafting the countless discovery requests for Carl and block everything else out. I don’t look up until my window has gone dark and night has fallen on Manhattan. The only sound, the periodic bleating of distant sirens, is soothing, a New York lullaby.

  It does not once occur to me to quit.

  Three

  I go home to a pile of laundry in the center of my apartment. Its staggering height pushes the alert level from yellow (elevated) to orange (high) that I will not have clean underwear tomorrow. I decide it doesn’t matter if I rebel against the panty police; no one will be checking under my skirt at work. If they do, they get what they deserve.

  The light of my answering machine double-blinks: Blink. Blink blink. Blink. Blink blink. This is answering-machine code for two messages.

  “Hey, Emily, it’s your father. Just checking in.” Click.

  “Hey, Em.” Jess’s voice bounces against the walls of my apartment and reminds me that I live in a perfect square. “Hope you’re holding up okay about the whole Andrew thing. Friday night. You. Me. Merc Bar. We’re going out on the town. I will not take no for an answer.” Although I met Jess as a consequence of a random room assignment my freshman year at Brown, she has morphed from college friend into my Siamese twin/Magic 8 Ball/Jewish mother/codependent/Tony Robbins. I want to call her back, but I know it’s past her bedtime. Jess goes to sleep every weekday night at 10:43, the only remnant of her childhood struggle with OCD.

  I pick up the phone to call my father back instead, since he—unlike Jess or the rest of us, for that matter—does not believe in sleep.

  “This is Lieutenant Governor Haxby,” my dad answers the phone, apparently under the assumption that whoever would be calling him on his personal cell at one a.m. does not already know that he is the lieutenant governor of Connecticut. Or that anyone cares. I wonder if it was such a good idea to call after all, wonder if I should have continued our endless game of phone tag. Talking to my dad has the unfortunate side effect of making me feel very much alone in the world.

  “Hi, Dad. It’s Emily. How are you?”

  “Good, sweetheart. Good. Keeping fit. Went for a six-mile run this morning. Five a.m.”

  “Wow, Dad,” I say, as if he doesn’t tell me this every single time I call. I think this may be a passive-aggressive way of criticizing me, since he knows I have not—have never—done the same.

  “Yeah, well, it’s important to stay fit. You should try it sometime. Maybe in Central Park.”

  “Dad, I live downtown.”

  “Oh. Maybe you could run up to the park then. That reminds me, I need to come see your new apartment one of these days.”

  “Not so new. I’ve lived here for over a year now.”

  “Right. Right. So what is the superstar litigator working on?”

  I tell my father about the Synergon case, mostly because we find it easy to talk about my job. As I describe what is going on in Caddo Valley, though, I worry, for perhaps the first time in my life, that I am giving my dad good reason to be ashamed of me. He is, after all, a civil servant.

  “Wow, kiddo. It’s great to make connections at Synergon,” he says. “You better put your time in on this one. This is the kind of thing that can make your career.”

  “But, Dad, I’m defending Synergon. I mean, I know they can’t prove anything, but still.”

  “Business is business, Em. You know that. And it never hurts to make friends in high places.” I realize now that I had wanted a different reaction from my father; I wanted him to scream at me, to tell me that what I am doing is wrong, that my work makes the world a worse place. I wanted us to have a fight about it, which is ridiculous, really. My dad and I have never had a fight. It is just not something my father does. Fighting is petty and distasteful to him, something better left to children.

  My father has that shellac that coats all politicians: the shine, the charm, the boyish good looks and graying temples. When he shakes hands, he uses both of them, to show how interested he is in meeting you. He’ll look you right in the eye too, as if to say I care. I don’t know what is underneath all the polish,
though. He has never shown me.

  The truth is, I love my father, but I don’t particularly like him. I guess I don’t particularly like him because I am not sure if he likes me.

  After my mother died and it was just the two of us in the house, there was a small window of opportunity when we could have at least tried to communicate. We could have screamed and cried and said all the things that would normally have been unforgivable. We could have wept together until we recognized that we had both lost one of the few things that connected us. Or we could have laughed maniacally, as I did with my friends in the corner after the wake, as if to say This doesn’t hurt, this doesn’t hurt, this doesn’t hurt.

  But that never happened. My mother died on a Thursday afternoon, and I was back in school on Monday morning. I wasn’t given the choice to stay home. We both figured out a way to feed ourselves, separately, and we went about our usual routines. As if we had always lived this way, as if nothing had changed, as if we didn’t suddenly feel like a three-legged dog.

  Though I know my father cried late at night while I lay in the bedroom next door, though I heard his heartbreak in the form of quick, strangled intakes of breath, the muffled sobs into pillows that echoed my own, I didn’t knock on his door, and he didn’t knock on mine. I thought about it, of course. Would stand outside his room sometimes, motionless, unable to lift my arms, unable to brush knuckle against wood. I am not sure why our doors felt so impenetrable. Maybe we felt some ownership over our grief, worried that by sharing it, we would be giving our only pieces of her away. Or maybe, neither of us had the strength left to console the other in the scary depths of night, since we exhausted all of our energy by day, busy, busy, busy pretending that we were just fine.

  “Dad, you know what? I’ve got to go. I still have more work to do tonight,” I say. White lie number one.

  “Okay. Please send my regards to Andrew,” he says.