by Norman Crane
As three young professionals, naturally all we talk about is work.
“Ollie’s getting fed up with criminal law,” Boris says at some point, and Oliver nods his approval. “He says all his firm’s clients are depressing. I keep telling him that we don’t deal with the most upstanding people, either, but he says at least we get to go on the attack once in a while, and at least when we deal with corporate or institutional clients, they pay up, and I can’t really counter that line of argument. Can you?”
“Not at this point in time, your honour,” I say.
Oliver’s eyes twinkle.
Around senior lawyers, we keep our mouths shut and our opinions to ourselves—baby vultures hesitant to wedge their pink faces between the hardened wings of experienced buzzards pecking at a newly dead carcass—but when it’s just us, safe in our shared lack of wisdom, we banter and expound like nobody’s business. All the better if there are laymen around to hear us. We might even slide a business card into one of their pockets…
“Is that a problem particular to Stephenson Ashford or with defence work in general?” I ask, remembering how many long nights and weekend evenings Rosie’s been pulling because she wants to work at that firm.
“In general.”
Shirtless, sweaty and with a pronounced belly, Oliver resembles a plastic buddha.
“So would you recommend it to him?” Boris says.
Oliver’s belly deforms as he swallows a loud swig of beer.
“Recommend what?” I ask.
“Private civil practice,” he says.
They both stare at me. “It’s pretty good work,” I say, wondering how I would fare as a criminal lawyer, arguing at bail hearings and criminal trials, trying to convince a judge to lower a sex offender’s sentence, standing up in front of a jury and quoting from the constitution as if it’s the word of a God whose presence has been expunged from our courthouses and minds, replaced by the all-knowingness and infallibility of another supreme being: the Supreme Court of Canada.
Really, I know squat about criminal law. “Civil certainly pays better,” Boris says to Oliver, and they exchange devilish grins. “But Charlie knows all about that, having just settled a case worth some fine coin.”
“How much?” Oliver asks.
“That’s privileged.”
Then “Shit!” Boris yells so suddenly I bounce in my chair, nearly spilling what’s left of my beer. He leaps toward a pile of clothes by the pool, rips out a phone, explaining to us that he forgot to call a client, starts walking away to find some privacy, yells “Fuck!” even louder, and curses out his dead battery. “Guys, I need a phone here pronto.”
Oliver shrugs. “Inside.”
I retrieve mine and hold it out for Boris to take.
“May I use your phone?” Boris asks.
It’s a bit of a strange question. “Sure,” I say. “That’s why I’m giving it to you.”
“Thanks.”
He snatches it and stalks away, disappearing eventually behind the pool house.
Oliver shifts in his chair. “So, how’s Rosie doing these days? I see her in court sometimes, but she always looks like she’s got more work than time to do it in.”
“That’s about right. She’s pretty busy,” I say.
After what seems like an hour of idle chatter with Oliver, Boris reappears. Red-faced, he hands me my phone, picks up his clothes and tells us he’s got to fly. “Client’s pissed, have to go to stroke his ego awhile.” I feel the urge to ask which client, but Oliver’s here and I don’t want to spill any of Winterson’s secrets, so I wish him luck instead. Oliver tosses him a beer for the road and waves. I sit by the pool, shooting the shit with Oliver for another thirty minutes, before the increasingly uncomfortable atmosphere becomes so oppressive I make up an excuse and leave. Driving back into the city, I tell myself that Oliver and I don’t know each other, and that’s the reason for our awkwardness, but even then I know that’s not the truth. We come from different worlds, rich and middle class? Maybe. I don’t want to think about it. I call Rosie like requested, and when I step through the apartment door dinner’s almost ready. She lays it out for me like a royal meal. Emotionally, she remains distant. We discuss politics to avoid talking about reality. Dusk comes. Followed by Sunday night, which falls as cleanly as a guillotine.
I go to work early on Monday. Opening the firm’s front doors several minutes before 7 a.m., I’m still tired after a sleep so heavy its weight lingers on my body, but at the same time I’m glad to be starting another week of activity. I stop in reception long enough to finish a yawn, smile and say “good morning” to Amanda, who, seated behind the front desk with her Bluetooth headset already firmly positioned on her head, appears to have been here for hours. She types something into her computer, returns the greeting and says, “Mr. Winterson wants to see you in his office, Charlie.”
“Thanks, shoot me an email when he gets in.”
“He’s already in.”
That can’t be right. I glance at my wrist; I’m not wearing a watch. I glance at the clock hanging over one of the firm’s recently purchased pieces of local abstract art. Impossible. “In his office?” I ask, mostly to justify the dumb openness of my mouth.
She nods.
And I jog up the stairs to the second floor, where Winterson’s office overlooks the jewelry store on the opposite side of the street. We’ve had their business for over twenty years. That’s a factoid Winterson told me the day he hired me. I supposed then it was an acute lesson in loyalty. Now, despite the distance from the bottom of the stairs to Winterson’s office door being less than twenty metres, I imagine the various emergencies that could rouse Winterson sufficiently to get him here at the break of a Monday dawn. None make sense. Before walking in, I nonetheless compose myself and tell myself that whatever happens he’s also going to commend me on my performance on Tabatha Holdings.
“Shut the door,” Winterson says.
He’s standing at his desk, facing the far wall, with his hands hidden behind his back and his desktop monitor turned abnormally away from everything.
I can hear his breathing and the buzzing of his computer.
I close the door per his instructions.
“Sit,” he says.
I sit.
He inclines his head, looks at me from a spot somewhere above his bushy moustache and below his severe eyebrows, sighing shakes his head, and paces the full perimeter of his office, lined with diplomas, historical memorabilia and fishing trophies, before returning to the other side of his desk. He also sits. His leather chair exhales. Without a word, he next rotates the monitor to face me—I see the familiar logo and layout of YouTube—clicks his mouse and says, “This is on the internet.”
The video comes to life.
Pixels move.
But the video is not a video but a mirror, because what I see on the other side is myself. Except this other me, the YouTube me, is not sitting and watching himself, barely moving a facial muscle; the other me is holding a rum bottle and drinking, slurring his words, dancing, giggling over the mispronunciations of racial epithets, slanting his eyes, talking about sex, stripping off his clothes—
Winterson stops the video with a mouse click.
“Is that you?” he asks. His jaws grind together so hard his cheekbones threaten to distend his face.
The question is a formality. It’s plainly me on the video. I know it, the beads of sweat leaking through the pores on my cheeks know it, and Winterson knows it. I can almost hear his teeth gritting.
“Yes.”
“What the fuck were you thinking?”
I want to answer him, but I can’t because I’m too busy staring at the frozen image on the monitor, staring at myself sitting on a bed decorated with scattered tulips. “Charlie, fuck.”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
I note the video is twenty-seven minutes long. I’ve only seen a fraction of it.
Even through a fuzzy memory, I know it gets worse.
<
br /> Winterson rests his hands on his desk and slides them apart and toward me until he’s leaning forward with his head a foot off the desk’s surface. He looks up. He sighs. “I’ve been in here since four in the goddamn morning, dealing with this shit. Talking with the partners. Trying to figure out what to do. And not one of us has come up with an alternative. Not a single one. Can you come up with an alternative?”
“An alternative to what?”
I can pose formalities as questions, too. To be fired: it feels like someone froze my insides and lit a blowtorch next to my face. I expect, at any moment, to start bubbling.
“You caused harm to the firm, Charlie.”
I babble another apology—
“Shut up!” Winterson booms, pushing himself off the desk, scattering his assortment of pens. “Don’t talk anymore. Shut up, sit still and listen. I like you, Charlie. I hired you because you were personable and had potential. You made clients comfortable. But now? Now you’ve made a public mistake. You’ve fucked up for the whole world to see. Whatever reputation you had, it’s shot. I don’t give a crap about how this video came about. Whether you don’t do shit like this or you do and make sure none of it sees the light of day is not my concern. It’s not the firm’s concern. But your reputation is the firm’s concern. Because your reputation is not just your reputation but our reputation. When we do good, you gain by association. And when you fuck up, Charlie, we lose by association. You know how long I’ve worked to build this firm. You know I won’t stand to lose face, directly or otherwise. I will not,” he says calmly, pausing for effect before exploding: “lose clients due to some junior associate’s Bacchanalia!”
He’s been rehearsing that line. I take that as my cue to stand up. As I do, Winterson squares up to me. “It disappoints me to have to say this. It truly does,” he continues.
So say it, I think.
He says nothing.
We stand like that for several elongated seconds before it hits me that he expects me to quit. I refuse in silence.
Finally, he shakes his head. “You’re fired, Charlie.”
The sweat on my skin freezes as the block of ice within me erupts with magma.
Winterson holds out his hand to me and for no good reason I shake it. At least I think I shake it. My whole body is shaking: at the firing, at the existence of the video, at those scattered, half dead tulips…
“You have the rest of the day to clean out your office. Leave your building keys with Amanda when you leave.”
As he releases my hand, Winterson does a quarter turn away from me and, apparently overcome with emotion, jerks his knuckles into his mouth with about as much subtlety as an amateur stage actor playing Hamlet for the first time.
I leave.
In my office, I shovel my belongings into several cardboard boxes and walk the cardboard boxes out the back door, to my car. It takes less than forty minutes. Whenever I pass a clerk or secretary in the hall, I drop my head. In shame? To avoid sentimentality? One of those. Otherwise, I take turns dragging my feet and rubbing my eyeballs, which I feel I’m inflating with each haggardly step. I must look bug-eyed, inhuman. The last time I leave the building, I leave through the front. Amanda says nothing but I can tell she knows. Amanda knows everything. She is the hub of all information. I hand her my building keys and wish her a pleasant day. She says young people always have so many more chances. But she doesn’t punctuate her sentence with my name, and that’s how I know I’m not a lawyer with Winterson & Partners anymore.
I walk the length of parking lot, turn back, walk it again, and lock myself in my car with the windows closed. The temperature rises immediately. I could roast in here, but I push back my seat, open the door a crack and stare through the front windshield at the firm’s building instead. I have a good view. I watch the lawyers park their cars and enter a place I no longer work at, and only gradually do I realise how hard my heart is beating. My pulse isn’t high, just powerful. I punch the clock on the dashboard to its beat until the LCD display shuts off and no longer comes back to life. If someone looks my way, I sink in my seat and pretend not to exist. Who cares if they see me or not, I think. But if that was true, I wouldn’t be sinking down in the first place. I cannot refute my own argument. I win, I lose. I couldn’t feel any worse. I see Boris’ car stop on the street, put on its blinker and wait for opposing traffic to clear before pulling into the parking lot. I watch its spinning, sparkling hubcaps, its cheaply tinted windows, through which I see the outlines of two figures, and take note of where they park. Boris gets out of the driver’s side. Oliver steps out of the passenger’s side. He’s laughing. Boris is talking. I can’t hear his words, just a faint, monotonous drone peppered with nasally chortles. In one angry motion, I stab the ignition with my car key, turn the engine, and shoot out of the parking lot in the direction of Rosie’s apartment building.
A car honks—
And I punch the break with my foot.
That’s the extent of my pissed off, who-dares-wins attempt at reckless driving. With the Winterson & Partners sign still in my rear-view, I exhale and merge politely with traffic.
I’m so disoriented, I mess up a route I’ve taken almost every day for over six months.
Approaching intersections, I say the colour of the light out loud because otherwise I’m afraid I’ll drive straight through a red.
In the apartment building’s parking lot, I park across two spaces, leave the car door open and run up the stairs, slipping twice to my knees, because I can’t stand waiting for an elevator. I have no plan. I’m just mad, hurt, confused, and with no place else to go.
I sprint the length of the hall to our door.
But it’s locked.
I unlock it.
I turn the knob, and push—
Right into a deadbolt.
“Rosie!”
No answer.
I rattle the door.
“Rosie! Let me in, please. I know you’re inside. I know you are.”
I bang the door open as far as the deadbolt allows and peek inside, contorting my body and craning my neck to get all the possible angles of sight.
“I’m sorry,” Rosie says.
I can’t see her but I back away, leaving the door open.
“Let me come in.”
“No.”
“Come on. Are you afraid?”
No answer.
“You’re afraid I’ll do something? Seriously, you’re out of your mind.”
Now I see her. She’s standing a dozen feet away, in the living room. There doesn’t seem to be anyone else inside. “It sounds like you’re out of yours, Charlie.”
I ignore that. “Why’d you do it?” I ask.
She returns my ignoration.
I try a different tack. “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”
Nothing.
I inhale, and scream “I love you!” at the opening in the doorway: through which I spy Rosie’s posture wilt.
“You don’t,” she says.
“I want to have kids with you, a family…”
She steps closer. I press my face nearer the door. We’re maybe three feet away from each other. At any moment, I expect her to slide the deadbolt out and let me into our apartment.
But she doesn’t. “You’re a fool.”
Now it’s my turn to be silent. She continues, “And if you ever thought we’d have that, you’ve no business being in a courtroom or representing a client, because you’d only be a gullible liability to them. I’m thirty-seven years old, Charlie. Do I have to spell it out for you? If I wanted kids, I would have had kids by now.” Each of her words is a vice, every pause a pair of jaws. “You asked me why I did it. I’ll spell that out, too. I’m a good lawyer. I care about my career. I can’t have the kind of relationship you want because I don’t care about the things you care about. Our priorities are vastly different.”
She keeps talking, but I no longer listen. It’s not that I doubt her sincerity—I know she’s being painfull
y honest—but the entirety of the conspiracy has thrust itself over my head like a burlap sack, dulling my senses. I fall against the wall, and drip to the floor. Rosie wanted to work at Stephenson Ashford but there wasn’t a spot. Oliver was working there but wanted to work elsewhere, in civil practice. I was working in civil practice at Winterson’s. Winterson couldn’t be bought, hence my spot couldn’t be got by money. However, it could be gained by reputation. By destroying mine, I vacated what was wanted by Oliver, who vacated what was wanted by Rosie, who traded me for the advancement of her career. Cold, efficient, professional.
“Charlie?”
“Yes.”
“It wasn’t personal. An opportunity presented itself and I took it.”
“At my cost.”
“I didn’t upload the video,” she says.
I rip the metaphorical burlap sack off my head. These attempts at legalistic justification are where I draw the line. “Maybe you didn’t upload it, but you manipulated me and you embarrassed me, and you did it knowing the video would get uploaded.”
“You willingly gave me your phone. You saw I was recording.”
“I trusted you!”
Two people down the hall are staring at me. A middle-aged man and a little girl. He’s holding a black garbage bag. She’s holding his free hand. I suppose I am making a scene in an apartment building where rent’s expensive and few scenes play out. Let them watch me:
Pound on the apartment door with my palm—
Bang!