Do This For Me

by Eliza Kennedy

  “It sounds kind of obvious, but you need to switch off your brain,” she said. “Try to be present in a physical way.”

  People swirled and pressed in all around us. Music pulsed and lights flashed.

  Stop thinking. Be present. Good advice, no doubt.

  I’d keep trying.

  From: Aaron Moore

  To: Raney Moore

  Date: Monday, January 29, 11:41 PM

  Subject: You, Us, Everything

  Dear Raney,

  I have no right to bother you, but I feel compelled to reach out, to try to explain. I wish I could stop, but I can’t seem to.

  I don’t know the right combination of words to bring you back. Maybe they don’t exist. But there are things you need to know about what really happened. The full scope of the situation. These facts might not help you forgive me, but maybe they’ll ease the pain you must be feeling. Pain that, once again, I caused.

  I’m just going to lay them out, in a way that might speak to you.

  1. The three months it lasted were the worst three months of my life. When I wasn’t with her, I was wracked with guilt. When I was with her, I didn’t feel all that much better.

  2. Three months is misleading. I saw her maybe half a dozen times. Not trying to minimize it, but…just to be clear.

  3. “It.” “Saw her.” These are euphemisms. Because I’m a coward.

  4. I kept meaning to stop. As soon as it started I wanted to stop. But then I felt like I had obligations to her, too. Because of what I—we—had done. And the decisions I had made. I didn’t want to hurt anyone. Of course, good intentions are meaningless when you act like a villain.

  5. You and I talked about why it happened, we talked about us, but there were other reasons. Reasons too embarrassing to share. I was feeling old, Raney. Used up. I was between books and had too much time on my hands. Nobody ever looked at me the way she did. Nobody ever wanted me. I was a big nerd, you know? A dorky bug guy, for God’s sake! It was flattering. I was someone different with her. I was—

  Delete!

  TWENTY-THREE

  “So,” Singer said. “Here we are.”

  I mustered an uneasy smile. “Here we are!”

  “Here” was a sleek and gleaming restaurant, inside a sleek and gleaming L.A. hotel, where we were staying after our court appearance earlier that afternoon.

  “Is Rahsaan feeling any better?” he asked.

  My associate had accompanied us to California, providing excellent assistance, as always. He should have been with us now. Instead, he was heaving in agony in his room upstairs.

  “Lox, in L.A.!” he moaned. “What was I thinking?”

  “Come downstairs anyway,” I said.

  “You want me to eat right now? There’s no way, Raney.”

  “I don’t want to be alone with him,” I confessed.

  “Who, Mickey? He’s great. And you…you…” Rahsaan covered his mouth and lunged for the bathroom.

  “He’s not well,” I told Singer.

  He unfolded his napkin. “Then my sinister plan worked.”

  I froze. “What?”

  “I’m kidding. I promise that my efforts to get you alone don’t extend to poisoning. Yet. Shall we order?”

  He was joking. Of course. A waiter sidled up and poured water. I was uncomfortable, which annoyed me. I’d been on dozens of dates in the last six weeks. Some of them had been awkward, or boring, but I’d never felt ill at ease.

  Get it together, I told myself. This is a business dinner, not a date.

  “Let’s do the chef’s tasting,” Singer said.

  I glanced at him over my menu. I liked his suit. You don’t see many brown suits. He reached for the wine list. He had good hands. Another waiter arrived and solemnly offered us three kinds of bread.

  “The duck is supposed to be amazing,” Singer remarked.

  “I don’t eat duck.”

  “I find that deeply troubling,” he said.

  “My apologies. But I had a pet duck when I was a kid.”

  “Name?”

  “Gladys.”

  “I thought you grew up in Brooklyn.”

  “In Crown Heights. People had all sorts of pets there. I knew a family that kept a tapir in a fourth-floor walkup.”

  Yet another waiter arrived. We ordered. The waiter left.

  “I think the plaintiffs will make a settlement offer within the next few days,” I said. “Based on the judge’s comments this afternoon, we should consider…”

  Singer was shaking his head slowly.

  “We’re not talking about work right now,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  He pushed his plate aside and rested his forearms comfortably on the table. “Because work, counselor, serves only one purpose: to be the thing you don’t have to talk about all the time. You go to work, right? You do your work. Then, if you’ve done it well, you get to knock off and come to a place like this, where you can have an excellent time, talking about anything but work.”

  I laughed. “We are such different people.”

  “Too bad for you, because I’m the client, so I set the agenda. Would you like a glass of wine?”

  “No thanks. What do you want to talk about?”

  “You,” he said. “Tell me your entire life story.”

  I started to demur. He waved a hand in the air. “Let’s skip over the standard objections—I don’t like to talk about myself, I’m not that interesting, blah blah blah. You’ve already name-checked Crown Heights, tapirs and domestic poultry, thereby piquing my interest. Also, we’ve got twelve courses coming. We have to talk about something.”

  I laughed again. He wanted my story? So be it.

  I began with my parents, and what little I knew of them.

  “I remember snippets, here and there,” I said. “A birthday party. A day at the beach. But I don’t know what’s real and what I reconstructed from photographs.”

  “It was a car accident?”

  “Drunk driver.”

  “Awful. Is that why you don’t drink?”

  “No,” I said. “I thought you wanted me to talk. What’s with all the interruptions?”

  He smiled, a little sheepishly. “I’m a lawyer. Asking questions calms me when I’m nervous.”

  “Why are you nervous?”

  “We’ll get to that,” he said. “Did you have any family other than your grandmother?”

  “A few cousins on my dad’s side, but they lived far away.”

  “She was his mother?”

  “My mom’s.” I paused, remembering. “I never saw her cry. My grandmother, I mean. I never saw her sad. Now that I’m a mother, I can’t imagine it. She put on a good show for me. She must have been tough.”

  “Runs in the family,” he remarked.

  Waiters began padding in and out of the room. So many waiters, so many plates, each graced with a tiny, sculptural bite. A sliver of fish atop a mound of pearlescent grains, surrounded by a pool of broth. A crisscrossed stack of vegetables sliced to translucence.

  “That’s amazing,” Singer said, savoring something. “What is that?”

  I could only guess. “Shallot?”

  “Fennel, I think.”

  I attended firm dinners all the time, lavish events intended to impress clients or win business. I never paid much attention to the food. But now I did, and it was astonishing.

  I told Singer about growing up in Brooklyn. High school. College. Meeting Aaron. Law school.

  “I have an uncouth question,” he said. “How old are you?”

  “Thirty-eight in July. Why is that uncouth?”

  “Some people don’t like it. Thirty-eight. Your firm’s website said you were admitted to the bar in 2003.”

  I smiled. “Do
you stalk all your outside lawyers?”

  “Excuse me, it’s called research. Now I’m going to display my astonishing math skills and conclude that if you were admitted in 2003, you graduated from law school at…twenty-two?”

  “I skipped a few grades early on.”

  “But if your daughters are fifteen, you must have—”

  “Had them during law school,” I said. Then I added, “They were an accident.”

  He leaned back, clearly surprised. Very few people knew that. Sarah did, of course, and Marty, but around the firm it was believed I’d simply wanted to start my family early.

  Why did I just blurt it out to Singer? I was in a confessional mood, I guess.

  “I got a bad cold at the start of my 2L year,” I said. “It turned into an infection, and I had to take antibiotics. My husband—he was my boyfriend then—had just moved to California for graduate school. He came back to visit Columbus Day weekend, and…well, antibiotics and the pill don’t mix so well.”

  I liked that Singer wasn’t interjecting or making sympathetic noises. He was simply listening.

  “Anyway, we decided to,” I looked down at my plate, “to not have them. Aaron was a superstar in his program, applying for all sorts of foreign grants. I was intent on big things, too. We didn’t even know if we wanted kids. But then I had a routine appointment, and found out that…there were two. Two heartbeats. At which point…”

  Tears began to prick my eyes. “I shouldn’t be dumping all this on you.”

  “Stop if you want, but not on my account.” His voice was so kind.

  I got a grip and continued. “Well, we couldn’t do it. Aaron moved back East. We got married. The girls politely waited until after finals to be born. I finished law school and started at the firm. Aaron transferred to a different graduate program, but he’d lost momentum. It took him years to finish. He…gave up a lot.”

  We were silent for a while. A waiter swooped in and brushed the table free of crumbs. Another poured more water. Finally, Singer spoke.

  “Way to kill the conversation, Moore.”

  I laughed, covering my face. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—”

  “Stop apologizing! It’s part of who you are. A surprising and fascinating part. You don’t strike me as someone who makes many mistakes.”

  I smiled ruefully. It was true: up to that point in my life. I’d been pretty much error-free. So much so that it took a few weeks for me even to consider the possibility that something had gone very wrong. Sarah bought the test. She also held me afterward as I fell apart on our bathroom floor. I’d had to tell Aaron over the phone. Then there was the sickness. The decision, made over hours of tearful phone calls. Then he came back.

  It was a calamity—a plan-changing, world-upending, life-altering mistake.

  Until I met them.

  “How many courses have we had?” I asked.

  “Five, I think. No. Six.”

  “Plenty of time to cover my marital disaster.”

  “Oh boy.”

  I outlined the entire saga, though I left out the specifics of how I responded. It was too complicated to explain.

  “Jesus, that’s awful,” Singer said. “How are your daughters coping?”

  “Far more maturely than their parents. They’re great.”

  “What did the e-mails say?”

  Waiters had arrived with the next course, and I was trying to puzzle out what it was. I looked up. “Sorry?”

  “The e-mails your husband sent to the woman,” Singer said. “What did they say?”

  I needed a minute to recover from my surprise.

  “Do you know,” I said, “you’re the first person to ask me that? Even my best friend tiptoed around it. Everyone is too horrified.”

  He looked a bit abashed. “Sorry. I’m insatiably curious and utterly tactless. A winning combination. Feel free to tell me to go to hell.”

  “No, it’s fine.” I poked at a tiny carrot on my plate. “The funny thing is, they didn’t say much of anything. Aaron writes—wrote—the best e-mails. They were always chatty and sweet. He really put himself into them, if you know what I mean. No surprise—he’s such a gifted writer. Anyway, the ones he sent to her were fine, but…”

  “They weren’t him.”

  “No. And they weren’t torrid love letters, either. They were friendly, they confirmed dates and places where they…” I glanced up at Singer, then down at my food again. “I’m sure there were a lot more of them—her husband said there were. But if these were the ones she chose to send me, if they were the most hurtful examples she could find…”

  “The whole thing probably wasn’t that serious,” Singer said. “At least on his side.”

  “Except that it lasted three months. And he lied.”

  “Of course.”

  More waiters. More plates.

  “I knew you weren’t boring,” Singer said at last, “but between the tragic youth, the unplanned pregnancy and the telenovela-level marital drama, well, let’s say you’ve exceeded my expectations.”

  I laughed. “Now it’s your turn to talk.”

  Singer grew up in the Midwest. Went to Brown, then UCLA Law. He told me about his son, his parents.

  “Why did you get divorced?”

  He hesitated before answering. “As a matter of fact, my wife had an affair.”

  I was mortified. “Oh,” I said stupidly. “I’m…so sorry.”

  “Not your fault.”

  “No, but I was running on about my travails, as if I were the first person it had ever happened to, while—”

  “It’s fine,” he assured me. “And anyway, the circumstances were different. My wife left me for him. They’re still together, and very happy.”

  “Why did she leave you?”

  He took a sip of wine. “You know the saying about law firm life—that it teaches you how to be a good lawyer and a bad person? It happened to me. I worked all the time. I drank too much. I was stressed out and grumpy. I didn’t parent for shit. I was a real dick.”

  “I can’t believe that.”

  His smile was brief, but grateful. “I like to think I’ve changed. I cleaned up my act. Went to therapy. Went in-house. Became a better father. I realized I was wasting my life working too hard and being dissatisfied. Slowly, painfully, I stopped.” He smiled at me cheerfully. “And here I am.”

  A new course arrived, a ribbon of meat draped across a tiny potato, daubed with a bright green sauce. “Is this lamb?” I asked.

  “I think it’s veal.”

  I wrinkled my nose. “I don’t like veal.”

  “You had a pet calf in Brooklyn, too?”

  “I like your voice,” I told him.

  “Thank you. I like yours.”

  I cut into the meat gingerly. “There’s nothing special about my voice.”

  “Of course there is. Your voice is vibrant.”

  “This is veal? It’s delicious.”

  He picked up his glass and swirled the wine around before tasting it. “Your voice conveys what you’re feeling. You’ve got a decent poker face, but a terrible poker voice.”

  “Singer.” I put down my fork. “Stop flirting with me.”

  “You started it! With the voice thing?”

  “You started it months ago.”

  “That’s the problem,” he conceded. “It’s become a habit. I don’t want to stop.”

  “Why not?”

  He gave me a wide, innocent smile. “Because I have a huge crush on you, Moore.”

  “Singer!”

  “You’re blushing!” He laughed. “Who knew such a thing ’twere possible?”

  “This is—”

  “Inappropriate.” He made a serious face. “I know. I think there’s a section of the Hyperium employee handb
ook titled Thou Shalt Not Shamelessly Hit on Thy Outside Counsel. I might even have written it. Some people would think I’m being a horrible pig—”

  “No, no,” I said. “You’re not.”

  “Well, that’s the thing, Moore. I have the funniest feeling you don’t really mind. Must be something in that voice of yours, or the way I catch you looking at me sometimes. I know I’m not supposed to say any of this, either. How dare I be so presumptuous and cocky and…male, right? But I think life is a little too short not to say exactly what’s on one’s mind. Don’t you?”

  I couldn’t believe he was saying these things. Putting himself out there like that, unafraid of rejection, or what I might say.

  “How can you come right out and admit that you have a crush on me?” I asked. “Aren’t you—”

  “Embarrassed?” He shrugged. “You’ve already rejected me once. And it’s not like we didn’t both know what was going on.”

  Had I known? I’d certainly done my best to deny it.

  What was happening in this conversation? What was I supposed to do?

  “Why do you have a crush on me?” I asked.

  “Because you’re smart and weird,” he said. “And you can be hilariously mean.”

  “I’m not mean!”

  “I don’t meet many people who surprise me, but you surprise me. And of course, I find you incredibly attractive.”

  I looked into his eyes, then quickly away.

  “You can do better,” I said.

  “Can I?” He propped his chin on his fist. “Tell me more.”

  Strategic error. I cast around for the waiters. “How many courses do we have left?”

  “Three. Plenty of time for you to explain why you think I could do better.”

  “I just mean,” I fumbled for my napkin, “you’re intelligent. You obviously know how to enjoy life. And you’re, you know. Good-looking.”

  He placed a hand on his chest. “Be still my heart.”

  “Singer,” I said sternly.

  He put both hands up, laughing. “I’ll stop. I’m not really making you uncomfortable, am I?”

  On the contrary. The last few minutes had been shocking, they’d thrown me off balance, left me feeling tongue-tied and foolish.

  They’d been completely delightful.