Amy remembered finding herself in a brief conversation during the cocktail hour one year with Rita Pfarrer, the wife of one of the partners, and she recalled how Rita had talked at brutal length about a golf vacation she and her husband had taken to a castle in Ireland. Amy had looked past this wife to the other lawyers who stood tantalizingly in the distance. As soon as she could escape her she did, and she knocked back ice-cold Cosmopolitans in big martini glasses with her friend Lisa Silvestri, then stood with Lisa and Leo and the other associates she liked.
Rita Pfarrer was dead of colon cancer now, and Stewart Pfarrer had retired. The old guard was mostly gone, and the newer guard, which included senior salaried associates like Leo and his friend Corinna and some others, had begun its ascendancy. Lisa Silvestri had hung on, and unlike Leo had been made partner. She’d never married or had children; she’d made a series of choices, or work had claimed all her time, for at age forty she seemed on her own, occasionally calling Amy at the height of a weeknight, a school night, wanting to chat.
She was the first person Amy saw tonight when she and Leo entered the banquet room. There was Lisa, a tall, big-breasted, formidable woman in a black cocktail dress, standing with a few other partners and their spouses. Leo steered Amy over, and soon she was in the circle too, where she didn’t really want to be. Now the men and a few of the women leaned in to one another and talked shop. The dance floor was dark and polished, and the band played the same echoey, listless songs she had danced to in college, while the lawyers and their spouses located their name cards and sat down. The large round tables created a wedding atmosphere, and Amy found herself between two lawyers she had seen at Kenley Shuber functions before but had never spoken to. One, Ron Devenish, was in his forties, thickset, bald, and distracted, and the other, Mark Canterburg, was young and courtly, or at least he behaved that way during the appetizer course, a small tureen of butternut squash soup.
From all around the room came the gabble of conversation, the clanking of spoons against china, the tentative sucking-in of too-hot soup. Amy noticed a young woman sitting a few seats over—the wife of one of the youngest associates, who had a baby at home—and she looked neither overly unhappy nor uncomfortable to be here. This evening was for her husband, she was probably thinking. Oh yes, it was extraordinarily boring, perhaps one of the most boring ways possible for humans to spend an evening, but it wasn’t meant for her, it was meant for him. The young wife had nothing to prove, and so she took a long hit of her drink, pressed a waled curl of iced butter into her sourdough roll with a blunt knife, and then sat back calmly to drink and eat and look around the room. Far across the table Leo sat between one of the most senior partners, a man with wild, untended eyebrows, and his friend and colleague Corinna Berry, young, black, pretty, her body like a blade inside a night-blue sheath. Leo’s head was moving back and forth, as though each of the lawyers satisfied a different need in him. He turned to the old partner and appeared boyish and sonlike, and then he turned to Corinna Berry and just appeared happy. Even through the blockade of the floral centerpiece, with all its shoots and tendrils and oversized blooms, Amy could recognize her husband’s momentary pleasure.
But over here, on the other side of the flowers, Amy sat between two lawyers in a kind of funk. Devenish took it upon himself to speak to her first. After it was established that she was married to Leo, there was a brief, dull volley with a dead ball about the status of recent litigation, and how the Pittsburgh case—“the salmonella defense”—was going. Then, when it was revealed that Amy too used to work at Kenley Shuber, the lawyer regarded her with sudden mild interest.
“So where do you work now?” Devenish asked.
“Nowhere,” she said.
“Ah,” he said. His eyes dashed past her, then quickly dashed back, as if realizing he had been reflexively rude and trying to cover it. But she’d seen the eye dash, just as she had seen it many times before in the city. If you had a career here, then you were given a chance to stump for yourself. People were relieved when you were able to say that you did something. Without the cloak of a profession, there was no way to judge you and come to some hasty decision. If you said you did nothing, though, the person’s eyes might dash past you, over to someone who did something and who could be assessed and talked to with ease. Here and in L.A. and perhaps in London and wherever else there were important jobs and the feeling of a stirring economy, utility often beat quietly inside friendship, and you quickly assessed the way that the other person might be helpful to you, even at a distant point in the future.
Now, at dinner, Canterburg hadn’t heard Devenish’s question, and a moment later, after Devenish returned to the robotic eating of his dinner, Canterburg tried his own version. “So what do you do, Amy?” he asked heartily, as though it was an original question.
“I eat bonbons all day,” she said.
Canterburg looked at her for a long moment. “Oh my God,” he said. “I would do that in a minute.”
“You would?” She was confused by what he’d said; no one had ever expressed such a desire to her.
“Oh yes,” he said. “I am so burned out, you have no idea.”
“I was kidding.”
“I know,” he said. “But I wasn’t.” He smiled, and she, surprised, smiled too, and they started to settle into talking, but all of a sudden Amy looked up and saw that Corinna Berry had grabbed Leo’s hand and was taking him onto the dance floor. He seemed incapable of refusing her this, and he looked helplessly at Amy and shrugged.
She dispassionately watched Leo dance with this slender young woman; he was an inadequate dancer, and Amy had learned this on one of their earliest dates. His skill had never improved, and so dancing was not a part of their life together. It wouldn’t have occurred to her to try to get him to dance with her tonight; she didn’t want to stand close to him or talk much to him. But she saw that he didn’t look unhappy at all as he moved around on the floor like a bear with a young woman trapped in his paws. He looked awkward but content, he and Corinna leaning into each other, laughing and whispering. Lisa Silvestri was watching them too, and Amy knew her old friend must feel sorry for her.
By the time the plates of prime rib had been cleared away, Canterburg and Devenish had moved their chairs slightly back from the table and were talking only to each other behind her head. A woman from an adjacent table joined them. Amy listened a little, understanding virtually all of what they said, but realizing that, though sometimes the conversation seemed to gather itself up and become lively, there were many tired, end-of-workday, generic moments. The three corporate lawyers sitting together seemed intermittently engaged and bored by their own talk. Mostly they didn’t speak about the subtleties of the law, the beauty and specificity of legal language, the intricacy of a case that kept them up at night. They talked about the upcoming weekend retreat and about billing clients. The woman said she had become a billing machine, and that soon she was going to start billing her children for the time she spent playing Clue and Boggle with them.
Amy remembered going for the job interview at which she was asked about that legal software, Juxtapose BriefScan, and how hopeless she’d felt when it became clear that she knew nothing about it. She’d long lost her old debater’s bravado, too. Instead, like so many people she knew, she’d sought satisfaction around the edges, and time had slid past, and until recently she rarely had been idle and often in fact had been very busy. That life could be so boring, of course, she thought, not unlike the way a job could easily be boring. It seemed to her now, looking around this huge ballroom of corporate lawyers and their spouses, that work did not make you interesting; interesting work made you interesting. She realized only that she came down on the side of purpose.
That night in bed, stripped of their dress-up clothes, Amy and Leo lay on their backs in their pajamas, side by side. He belched slightly and touched his stomach. “That prime rib is just sitting there,” he said. “And I feel like I drank too much.”
??
?You could have told them not to refill your glass,” she said with mild disgust.
Leo was already turning away on his side. He might have been Devenish, she thought. Leo was indifferent to her too, by virtue of having a fixed place in the world, a good answer to the question of what he “did.” But he wasn’t superior. She might be limited, but he, in his small and maddening and ordinary way, was immoral. It was unplanned, but Amy put a finger on his shoulder and said, “I have to ask you something.”
Leo turned around in bed. She waited a second and then she just said it. “What was the story with those receipts?”
“What?” asked Leo.
“The receipts in the desk last month. The ones from St. Doe’s—the paperweight I bought my mother, which you called a ‘client gift,’ and I think the bar bill from the island, and a receipt from that Tuscan place we went to.”
“Amy,” he said, “you haven’t worked in a really long time, so you don’t know.”
“Tell me, then.”
“It’s not a big deal. And that client gift—it was a couple of hundred dollars.”
“Yes. ‘Two hundred tirty-tree dollars.’”
“What?”
“Among everyone we know,” she said, “you were the moral one. At the Japanese restaurant on curriculum night, you’re the one who invites Geralynn Freund to join us. You just do these things. It’s you. But then you go and do this, and what am I supposed to think?”
“Everyone does what they need to,” said Leo. “I’m like the last one to know this. Otherwise, it’s just too hard to get by. We are so deeply in debt, and you want so many things.”
“I want?”
“Yes! You want! A weekend spa trip with Jill. Sending Mason to private school. And, of course, that ridiculous trip to St. Doe’s, where you spent thousands of dollars of our money. Including that paperweight.”
“You said the trip was fine. And we used mileage and credit card points,” said Amy.
“Mileage, yes. Credit card points, no. What did you think, this elite place that nobody’s supposed to know about takes credit card points?”
“So why did you say we could go?”
“Because I knew you really wanted to. And basically you take care of everything outside work, and I felt bad, and wanted to give you this. You wanted me to say yes; you left it wide open so I could say yes. But I am just working so much, and it’s never enough.”
“Someone could find out about the receipts, couldn’t they?” she asked.
Leo shrugged. “It’s possible, not likely. But yes, it’s happened at other firms.”
“So those receipts are just floating around in somebody’s file somewhere? Was it the first time?” Leo didn’t say anything, and Amy said, “What is wrong with you?”
“What is wrong with you?” he said. “You want to be in this marriage, but you also want to be this child. Not knowing things, except every once in a while when you absolutely have to.” He looked away from her, then looked back sharply. “We could not afford that trip,” said Leo. “We really cannot afford our life. Those receipts do nothing, do you get it? They are my pathetic way of trying to be resourceful, when in fact there is no way.” Then Leo’s mouth rearranged itself into a grim little line. “I can barely support you and Mason,” he said. “I can barely do what I’m supposed to do.”
Amy’s heart was fast now. “We can put Mason in public school,” she said. “It wouldn’t be the worst thing. And it would help a lot, right?” Leo didn’t say anything; he just kept looking at her. “All right, then. I’ll go back to work,” Amy finally said. “Not just a volunteer job, like I was thinking about. A law job. I’ll do T&E somewhere, if I can.”
Leo nodded, as if he knew she would say this. “It’s not so bad,” he said gently. “You’ve wanted to work. You’ve been ambivalent about still staying home. You always talk about it, and then you don’t do it, and I figured that one day you really would.”
“Yes,” she said, her voice starting to waver, “but I didn’t want it to be like this. Under duress. I don’t know how to get back into things. I don’t even know how to use Juxtapose BriefScan!”
Leo appeared confused. “Why would you? It was discontinued two years ago. We use Comprehend Corporate Litigator now. CCL.”
So much time had passed that the dazzling new software from that job interview was now old hat. She herself was so old hat that it was absurd to think she could just come back. But she would have to. She’d sit with Leo in the tiny study at the Sven desk, and he would show her how to use Comprehend Corporate Litigator, and how to interpret the monthly statements that were jammed crudely into their mailbox like ransom notes. She would read their credit card statements in detail, including the penalties that gathered, and she would see just how deeply in debt they were and would understand what they were up against. Looking at the numbers at the bottom of the bills, she’d know that they weren’t abstract figures but were real and unmanageable.
Amy would sit in that study—finally the word “study” would have meaning as a name for this room—and she would start to read her old legal textbooks and some of the law journals that Leo kept bound on the shelves, and after a while she would have remembered enough from her previous life as a lawyer so that, although she wouldn’t be at all caught up with everyone else, she would at least be somewhere in the crowd, struggling, taking the subway during rush hour, lying in bed at night with clients in her mind, all of them dancing in a circle and keeping her awake. God, she would have to wear panty hose again every day, she realized.
“Do you think anyone will hire me?” she asked Leo in a small voice.
“Ah, probably. Not for a lot of money, and not somewhere that’s so-called good. But there are a lot of firms.”
She nodded, accepting this. “At the dinner tonight,” Amy said, “when you were dancing with Corinna Berry, I have to say that really depressed me.” Then she asked, “Why don’t you want to sleep with me anymore? Am I completely unappealing to you sexually? Am I like a crone? Like a cow? Just the mother of your child, and so I’m desexualized?”
“That’s ridiculous,” Leo said. “It hasn’t got anything to do with you. We’ve just gone off a little,” he tried, kindly.
“It’s more than that.”
He paused. “All right, sure, it’s a lot of things, I guess. It happens all the time, and it’s as common as anything. As common as those receipts,” he felt he had to add. “But there’s another part too: I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Amy, but I have put on twenty-one pounds this year. I’m like a whale.”
“You are not.” But she thought about the cookies he ate each night before he went to bed; recently, he had purchased a box of shaggy coconut Girl Scout cookies from the daughter of a colleague. Amy recalled the “chocko” Bing-Bongs he had brought home from St. Doe’s and had placed on a plate by the bed the night before, and the pastries that were laid out on platters at his office in the mornings.
“Yes, I am,” he said. “And the idea of having sex and of you seeing this stomach rising up above you like the sun, well, it makes me want to die. I look like my father,” he said. “I’m a middle-aged guy who looks like Murray Buckner, who ran the magazine stand in the Strode Building. Now how did that happen to me?”
“It happens to everyone.”
“It doesn’t happen to you,” he said. “You get to stay home and take care of everyone and everything, including yourself. You’re basically holding back time.”
“Oh, is that what I’m doing?” she said. “I don’t think so.”
It was the longest conversation they had had in a while. There would be further conversations about all of this; they would carry Amy and Leo through the weeks and months. Much of what they said would be repetitive. At times Leo would be interested in the conversation, and often he would not. When she spoke about Mason’s school or about how much she missed Jill or about how Roberta was moving to Harlem and they would see each other far less frequently, she saw that he did liste
n but that there was effort involved. He couldn’t help the fact that he was only partly compelled by the world she had fashioned over the past ten years since she had left work and Mason had been born. That world could be absorbing yet was also pulled along by a current of tedium, and everybody knew it.
Children had a lot to do with it; they were the most fascinating part of it all, but mostly only to their own parents or, depending on the particular aspect, sometimes only to their mothers or only to their fathers. You stayed around your children as long as you could, inhaling the ambient gold shavings of their childhood, and at the last minute you tried to see them off into life and hoped that the little piece of time you’d given them was enough to prevent them from one day feeling lonely and afraid and hopeless. You wouldn’t know the outcome for a long time.
“I have to go to sleep now,” Leo said finally. Then he added, “If I was able to stay home all day, I’d lose weight.”
“But you would go out of your mind.”
“Maybe,” he admitted. Then he said, “I really don’t mind my job, you know. I actually like it a whole lot more than you think. I like the days when I get to go to court. I like talking to the judges. It’s always really interesting there.”
“I know,” she said.
“If I stayed home, I’d read a lot of Thomas Mann. I’d read the one that I never got around to reading. The very long one.”
“They’re all long.”
“How did Thomas Mann find the time to write such long books?” Leo asked. “Nobody has that kind of time now. The entire world is so impatient.”