Life After Yes (9 page)

Whenever an associate leaves—for another firm, to soul search, to start a business—he or she is almost instantaneously replaced. Offices are refilled, cases are restaffed.
Firm directories, updated. Associates, like party pastries, are fungible.

But tonight that's a good thing. That I am a number, a cog in the big corporate machine, means that I can focus on other things. Leave early on a random night to have dinner with Sage. Even quit if I feel like it. Tonight, the firm is a lovely and golden revolving door. Not a chosen hell, a fire pit a human being can endure for only a limited time.

I hear someone say: “They spent two hundred and fifty dollars per person this year.” She's probably not that far off. Sure, they could've canceled this year's party and given the money to the victims of 9/11. Or the fight against AIDS. But instead they chose to spend it on
us.
To tell us they appreciate our work and devotion.

The bartender is a handsome bookend to a mundane day. He manages to look grungy in a tuxedo. Impressive. Kayla has noticed him too; we share the same taste in men. She wastes no time flirting. She grabs a pen from her purse and jots her cell phone number on a green cocktail napkin and hands it to him as he passes us our refills. His name tag tells us his name's Jake.

“Looks like you two are up to no good.” The voice is deep and male. It's Fisher. He stands behind us, swinging an empty martini glass. Tonight, Fisher is an overgrown boy with a winning smile.

“Hi. Yeah, the party is fun,” I say. I feel my cheeks redden.
The party is fun.
The sentence is beautifully simple in a kindergarten kind of way.

I watch, half horrified and half awestruck, as Kayla places her right hand on Fisher's shoulder and smiles. “Yeah, why not? You never know where you are going to meet someone these days. I prefer this to that online crap, you know? And I
figure we young lawyers need to loosen up a bit. Agreed?”

Unbelievable. Tonight, her confidence is legendary, enviable. Tonight, she's a spicy footnote in a boring book. Not the predictable ending to a formulaic story.

“Agreed. Have we met? You cannot be in the litigation department. I'd surely remember such a spitfire,” he says.

I'm mute.

“Kayla Waters,” she says, setting her wine on the bar and extending a manicured hand. “Unfortunately for you two…” she says, pointing at Fisher and me, “I'm in the department that actually brings in the dough so we can afford events like this.”

Fisher laughs. Not a cocktail party cackle, but a deep belly laugh. “Don't count us litigators out. They call me Bill for a reason.”

Kayla has practiced mingling with powerful people since she was a little girl. Training for life as a Stepford Wife started early; her mom dressed her in party dresses and pigtails and made her carry around trays of egg salad sandwiches to her parents' guests who drank hot toddies and mint juleps on their Connecticut porch. I doubt Mrs. Waters envisioned her little girl as an attorney at a big firm, flirting with a high-wattage career and a middle-aged man.

“Nice talking to you. Have a terrific evening,” Kayla says to Fisher, taking a delicate sip of wine, morphing back into the professional and polite associate she is by day. She walks away and leaves me standing with Fisher at the bar. I'm not moving at full speed; I think I'm still in shock.

Fisher looks up at me. I'm blocking the bar and I have nothing to say. He smiles, perhaps sensing my discomfort.

“Have a terrific evening,” I say. A sad copy of the original.

“These events require a three-martini minimum,” he says
under his breath, to no one in particular. And, I think:
This man is fun. The life of the party.

I find Kayla on the other side of the dance floor talking with Cameron Stone, a corporate associate in our class. Cameron's a boys' boy, a frat guy all the way, a Porter-in-training despite his good build. He went to UVA for undergrad and law school, and you can tell. His side-parted blond hair and caramel-smooth Southern accent have helped him with the ladies. I'm confident that he has bedded most of the paralegals in the corporate department.

“Hey guys,” I say.

“Hey girl,” Cameron says, and smiles, his Southern accent strong between sips of whiskey. “We were just talking about you.”

“Really?” I say, and look at Kayla. She smiles and shrugs her shoulders.

“I was just lamenting the fact that you're off the market,” he says. “I guess congratulations are in order.”

“Yes, it's a sad time for the male species,” Kayla says, looping her arm through Cameron's.

The music is loud. Carlisla, the quiet lady who works the graveyard shift at the document center, is in the middle of the dance floor, really getting down. She is wearing a short red crushed velvet dress that's very tight. As she shimmies to the music, she grabs the bottom of her dress and slides it up and down her thighs. She sings along to Chubby Checker.

We laugh. Good for her.

“Look at her go. Now that is impressive,” I say.

The crowd roars. Bill Frank, a real estate partner, now dances with Carlisla. He is easily two feet taller than she is. And not a very good dancer. Apparently, very limber though. He bends backwards, places his hands on the floor as if to
do a back walkover, and then he thrusts his body up again. Beads of sweat line his forehead. Carlisla seems to love the attention. She grabs his waist and grinds up against his bony thigh.

“What do you say we give 'em a run for their money,” Cameron says, and takes my hand.

“I don't dance,” I say, trying to pull my hand from his. “Not a talent I have.” I think of telling him how Sage calls me Jitterbug, but decide against it.

Cameron brings my hand up to look at my ring.

“Not too shabby,” he says, smiling.

He lets go.

 

So the party's a success, a success in the most contrived and plotted way possible, but still. There they are: a forty-something partner—Wonder bread white—who probably commutes from Bedford in his Mercedes SUV, and a single mom of three (I'm guessing here, probably not so PC)—of the whole-grain variety—who probably makes only a bit more than minimum wage. They dance together, not a care in the world, against a backdrop of American flags and spirited colleagues. The picture is both superficial and lovely. It would make for a very good picture in a firm brochure if such a thing existed.

It's getting late. I look around.

The party is winding down. The bartender has run out of Ketel One. The glorious snowman is melting.

For a moment, smiles outnumber frowns. Everyone appears happy. In my own haze, genuine optimism finds me and I smile.

I think of those little Towers, that little reminder in a random store window. I think of Sage at home in our bed, cud
dling our cat, falling asleep to
Conan
. I smile. A real smile.

Everything will be okay.

“Let's jet,” Kayla says, grabbing my arm, spilling wine. “The after party is at Swank. It should be decent. I hear they are going to open a tab.”

“I read somewhere that partying with colleagues helps the career. I like the theory,” Cameron says, draining his whiskey. “That and the one that says red wine is good for the heart.” He pounds on the wrong side of his chest.

And here I am laughing hard and drinking harder. Enjoying life. Like I should. And even as I stand here, smiling, flirting, I'm proud of myself for moving on. Because that's what I'm doing; moving on, relishing the precarious and precious present moment. And maybe it's the wine, but for the first time since everything happened, I can picture Dad, his vast and goofy smile, his yellow teeth. He always liked a good party. Never turned down an opportunity for just one more drink and a little Irish debauchery.

Tonight the image of Dad doesn't make me cry, but smile. Tonight it fuels me, emboldens me. Because he's not gone completely. Never will be.

And the thought is cheesy and trite and all of those things, but I feel it now: Dad's part of me, part of this reluctant Berry Baby. I have his pale skin and stubbornness and love of late nights. I have his eyes and his irreverence.

I'm my father's daughter.

“So, a few more drinks tonight might get me something more than a hangover?” I say, smiling.

“If you're lucky, girl,” Cameron says, lingering on his last word, “grrrrrllllll,” looking into my eyes and staying there for a moment, wordlessly luring me into a staring contest I quickly lose.

W
e're among the last to leave. Abandoning subtlety, hotel employees in ill-fitting maroon tuxes herd us through the vast ballroom doors and tell us to have a good evening even though evening is long gone. Before those big doors slam shut, I see the lights snap on; people buzzing like bees, collapsing tables, stacking chairs, vacuuming carpet, getting ready for the next gala for disgruntled strangers.

A man starts hacking away at that ice sculpture, decapitating the cocktail hour's robust snowman into flimsy chips and water. Easier to discard.

The coat check man waits for us, tonight's variety of privileged stragglers that lengthen his nights. He hangs over his stable door, staring us down with bloodshot eyes, fingering his overgrown mustache. He stands as we get close and I hand him twin plastic tags—mine and Kayla's—and in return he shoves a pile of black cashmere at me, leaving me
hugging what seem to be our coats. I spot Hula hairs on one and hand Kayla the other and float two crumpled dollar bills into his little wicker basket, which is about as empty as this man's eyes.

“Thank you,” I say. He looks at me, presumably another fungible face in the night's endless string of lawyers, tugs one end of that mustache, but doesn't respond. He removes the bills from the basket and smooths them out one by one, folds them down the center, and places them in his front pocket.

“Get a fucking razor,” Kayla mumbles as we walk away. “This isn't the seventies.”

We pack onto a waiting elevator, ignoring the conspicuous fire marshal's warning of a maximum capacity we vastly exceed. Bumping bodies, accidentally brushing fingers, we descend one floor at a time.

A centipede of lawyerly black, a parade of pinstripes, we troop through the lobby, quiet now but for saccharine swells of smooth jazz and empty but for clusters of boozed-up tourists and a single homeless man in the corner who tries to escape notice and stay warm.

We leave through the doors we entered hours before. Under the hotel's soiled and wind-whipped canopy, I wait with other associates of assorted shapes and sizes and one-size-fits-all drunkenness for a legion of preordered Town Cars to pull up, funeral-style, to take us somewhere where we can continue our collective binge.

“This Swank place is supposed to be
the
hot spot,” Kayla says, her words muffled by a massive black scarf that hides all but her eyes. She links her arm with Jeff Brice's, a corporate associate, fellow Greenwich kid, and friend of Cameron's. “Who knew meatpacking would become the mecca of cool?”

“Meatpacking. God, it just sounds so gay.
Meat. Packing
,” Jeff says, lighting a cigarette.

“They used to pack meat there,” Kayla says.

“I'm pretty sure they still do,” Jeff says, guffaws, and strokes his balding head.

“How's the Propecia treating you?” Cameron asks, and laughs, stroking his hand through his own thick hair.

“Fuck off, Stone,” Jeff says, smiles, and takes a drag.

“Hot spot, K?” I say. “Maybe if we're really lucky we'll spot some celebrity slipping in a pool of her own vomit.”

“Or forgetting to tip the waitress,” Kayla says.

“Or having a dance-off with another celebrity,” Cameron says, no doubt referring to a fallen pop princess and her estranged soul mate.

“Ahh, someone likes the gossip mags. And I thought readership was limited to those without a Y chromosome.”

Cameron's face reddens. “Sue me. I have a sister.”

“Sure you do,” I say.

“Meatpacker,” Jeff says, flicking ash.

“This one's got a phobia,” K says to Cameron, and points at me, and I wonder which one she's thinking of.

“Is that so?” he says, looking at me.

“I've got plenty of them,” I say. “I'm a New Yorker.”

“She doesn't like the subzero set, the nocturnal skinnies who prance around these places.”

“Well, that makes two of us,” Cameron says, looking me up and down. Thankfully, my coat, my cat hair–covered cashmere, hides my body. “We'll have to stick together then.”

“Deal,” I say.

“A little meat is a good thing,” Cameron says, his Southern accent echoing with the howling wind.

“Meatpacker,” Jeff mumbles.

“On the bones,” Cameron says.

Kayla and Jeff walk away arm in arm and leave me talking with Cameron. I slide in the backseat with them, and before I can shut the door, Cameron grabs the door, holding it open.

“Want to be on top?” he says, ducking down and smiling. He holds his hand out. His breath condenses on the tinted car window.

“Get in the front seat,” I say, and smile. “You're dirty when you're drunk.”

The driver starts moving things from the passenger seat; a phone book, an empty bag of Cheez Doodles, a tattered blanket.

“And she's flirty when she's drunk,” Kayla mumbles to Jeff, but I hear.

Cameron hasn't moved. He stays there, propping the door open, letting the cold wind slice through the backseat. The driver in the car behind ours honks the horn.

“Goddamn it, Stone, get in the fucking car,” Jeff says.

Cameron forces himself into the backseat, sits on me, and slams the door as we pull away. “Have it your way,” he says. “I've never objected to riding a pretty girl.”

“
Dirty
,” I say.

Cameron reeks of sweat and whiskey. He braces against the window so as not to crush me with his two-hundred-plus pounds. Under his weight, I feel warm, trapped, and secure. As the car shifts and turns, Cameron shifts his weight, rubbing up against me.

“You okay under there?” he asks.

“Yes,” I say. “Thankfully, I've got some meat on my bones.”

“Just the right amount if you ask me,” he whispers.

“I didn't,” I say, and hesitate. “But thank you.”

I look over at Kayla. She fights the weight of her eyelids, barely keeping them open. “Whore,” she says to me, and smiles.

“Yo, man. Will you pump up the radio?” Jeff hollers.

The driver—small, quiet, potentially Puerto Rican—turns and looks back at us. He squints his beady black eyes as if to say,
Who do you think you are?
Frankly, a very good question if he is in fact thinking it. But the man humors Jeff, turns a knob, and rap music pours from rear speakers.

“Thanks, man. You da bomb,” Jeff says, and I wonder if that term of endearment is PC these days. “What's your name?”

“Don't be a punk, Brice,” Cameron says. “He's a punk,” he says in a whisper to me.

“Juan,” the driver says. “My name is Juan.”

“Juanny, man, nice to meet ya. We're celebrating a cool twenty-K,” Jeff says. “How much do you pull in driving this boat around?”

“Brice, don't be a dick, man,” Cameron says, flipping his cell phone open.

“But Cam, man, I
am
a dick, and my mama always told me to be myself,” Jeff says, laughing, spraying vodka-drenched saliva, playing with his watch.

“This isn't the place, mama's boy,” I say.

“What, O'Malley—the bonus means nothing to you now that you've found yourself an i-banking knight?” Jeff says.

“Something like that,” I say.

“Knight, huh?” Cameron says. “That's tough competition for a measly little lawyer.”

“Not so measly,” I say, trying to revive my legs.

“Some of us,” Jeff says, burps, and pinches his fingers together, “have these little things called loans.”

“Cry me a fucking river, Mr. Rolex,” Kayla pipes in.

“Why not just a regular river?” I ask.

“Because sometimes it's not just a river, but a
fucking
river,” K explains.

“Got it,” I say.

“My buddy from law school works at legal aid and he just got word that his loans are being forgiven. Hell, I need some forgiveness too.”

“He's
helping
people who need it,” I say.

“So are we,” Jeff says. “So are we.”

“Yeah. We help people,” I say. “Rich men and some rich women. We help them get rich and stay rich. We help partners work their way to a second home in the Hamptons or the Vineyard. We help executives who've dabbled in insider trading, or set up offshore accounts, or defrauded shareholders.”

“So much for Project Optimism,” Kayla says.

Not too long ago, the executive committee, the team of rich and powerful, circulated a memorandum announcing our year-end bonuses. The announcement came three weeks later than it usually does because our firm had to wait and see what the “market” did. What that means is our firm waited to see what Cravath did. So, when Cravath decided to fatten first-year associate paychecks by a whopping twenty thousand dollars, our firm matched the number.

When I got that memo, I was happy too. Of course. Jeff's right; I don't have loans, but money is always a nice thing and I do feel that sense of satisfaction that in some way, in some small way, I'm being rewarded for my hard work even though I know all too well what we all should know: My bonus has nothing to do with the work I have done.

The snow has stopped. The streets have lost their tempo
rary magic. The traffic isn't terrible, though, and with little Juan at the wheel, we zoom through the streets, weaving in and out of other late night traffic, speeding through lingering yellows and stopping short at the occasional and sudden red. We bounce around, the four of us, packed like sardines in the pine-smelling backseat of this car chartered for our convenience.

Cameron still fiddles with his phone, thumbing blue buttons that flicker like fireflies against the dark windows. Even as the car jerks and he readjusts his body weight on my numbing legs, his fingers remain still, in control, as he text messages someone.

“So, where's your girlfriend?” I hear myself ask.

“Which one?” he says.

Sirens slice through the rap music and an ambulance flies around the corner, nearly grazing the front of our car, which Juan manages to halt just in time, lurching all of us forward, and sending that little phone flying from Cameron's hands.

He reaches down to retrieve it from the dark slushiness by our feet. Feeling around, fishing for his phone, he brushes my leg with the back of his hand, and I hope that my stockings will somehow disguise the fact that I haven't shaved in weeks.

“Got it,” he says, slowly coming up again. The car hits a pothole. “Shit. Lost it again.”

I feel a hard object slide toward me on the seat, wet against my inner thigh, and then Cameron's big hand comes crawling for it. I feel as his hand settles around the small phone. His hand stays down there, on the edge of the leather seat, motionless for a second or two, in the dark. I don't move. The music pumps on, seems louder all of a sudden.

“I don't have a girlfriend,” he whispers in my ear.

“Good.”

And then I feel his fingers moving around, gently tracing the length of my thigh. Those fingers stop where they shouldn't. He rests his fingertips there, firmly, against me, that spot—warm, hidden to all, now moist.

Thankfully, there's a fortress of nylon when I need it; control top pantyhose all of a sudden takes on a new meaning.

I think he waits for me to slap him.

But I don't.

His fingers flutter, tapping me, one finger, now two, now one, and then stop.

Now I reach my own hand down there, to find his, to stop this. I grab his hand, large, warm, now still. He grabs my hand as if he's been waiting for it the whole time, patient bait. He holds my hand in his and then moves my fingers where his have been only seconds ago, pressing my own fingers there, firmly against myself, as if to prove something that's already been proven. He loosens his grip on my hand and then laces his fingers in mine, pulling both of our hands out from under my skirt. Before he lets go, he traces the outline of my diamond, slowly, carefully, and gives it a gentle tug, spinning it on my finger, so the stone faces in and not out. Then he closes my hand in a fist around it.

Cameron
Stone.

Finally he pulls away, slush-slicked phone in hand, and mumbles, in words presumably clean to all but the two of us, “Did I get you wet? I'm sorry.”