Big Law (20 page)

“M
ACKENZIE
,” J
ASON CALLED DOWN
the hall. I whirled around, flushed with rage.

“You know what, Jason—if you wanted to break up with me, all you had to do was man up and tell me. But cheating on me? With HER? Like this? You have got to be kidding me,” I fumed, not caring who heard.

“You were never around,” Jason cried. “You can’t just expect me to camp out at your apartment, hoping to catch a glimpse of you.” He walked towards me, his expression softening. “I wanted to talk to you, I did. I tried …”

His words hit me like a slap. “Never around? Never around?” I repeated furiously. “Your little woman in there is the reason I was never around.” Then the pieces slowly began to fall into place and the anger started to burn through me. “You … you were the reason she wanted me to work with Saul. She was trying to remove me from the picture completely. Did … did you
know
about that? Did you two PLAN it? Hell, were you two screwing on my desk when I was away?” The fury in my voice took me by surprise. I noticed Jason flinch.

“Mackenzie,” a quiet voice called out behind him. “We didn’t plan it. It just happened.” I looked over to see Sarah walking towards us, looking disheveled and contrite. I fixed a steely glare in her direction. Adrenaline and humiliation were pulsing through my body. “Sarah, you claim to be committed to your career, but you’re just a two-faced
bitch out to steal everyone’s happiness because you can’t find any of your own.” With that, I turned away, blinking back the tears that were prickling in my eyes, and ran to the sanctuary of my office.

A massive sense of failure was swelling in my chest. Breathing deeply, I leaned against the wall, slid down to the floor, and buried my face in my hands. I choked back a huge sob. The easiest thing in the world would have been to let the tears flow, but once I started it would be too hard to stop. I rubbed my temples and replayed what I had just seen in my mind. Jason was banging my work nemesis. All the time I wondered why Sarah was out to get me, and now it came into painfully sharp focus: she wanted Jason and had thrown me under the bus to get him. I could hear the “ping, ping, ping” coming from my computer, signaling incoming emails. I suddenly felt nauseous. I needed to get out of there. Using the door handle for support, I got to my feet and opened the door. I peered up and down the hallway to make sure the coast was clear and darted towards the elevator vestibule before I bumped into anyone.

The elevator descended to the ground floor and I burst through the doors onto 56th Street. Tears started to roll down my cheeks as I folded my arms over my stomach and hugged myself. Standing there, in the spot that employees used for smoke breaks, I let the tears flow and didn’t even care that my mascara was running or that snot was dripping down my face. Roars of laughter and shouts swelled out of the Pig ’n’ Whistle as the door swung open and four men in grey suits spilled out. Even at 12:45
A.M
. on a random Tuesday, Midtown was buzzing. Overcome with shock and grief, I staggered to the sidewalk, no longer in control of my movement. Some greater force took over and willed my body to put one foot in front of the other. My voice didn’t even sound like my own as I stuck out my hand and yelled, “Taxi!”

I don’t remember telling the driver where I was going or the ride there or even pushing the third floor button in the elevator. Besides a feeling that my insides were imploding, the next memory I have is
the look on Kim’s face when she opened the door. Judging from her alarmed expression, I must have looked as bad as I felt.

“Mac, what happened?” Her eyes were filled with concern as I choked on my sobs. “Come here.” She pulled me inside, closing the door behind me.

“Is it work?” she asked gently, still holding my hands.

I shook my head.

“Jason?” Her expression was more intense now, anger already welling up on her face.

I nodded, choking back a huge sob. She guided me over to the couch where I plopped down, burying my face in my hands. She wrapped her arms around me, and I realized it was the first time I’d been hugged in weeks. It felt so unbearably good. I let the tears stream down my cheeks as I filled her in on every excruciating detail—the lunch with Ben, the stewing all day, the confrontation, the butt cheek, the humiliation—all of it.

I inhaled a deep, shuddering breath. “I didn’t even see this coming, Kim. It wasn’t even remotely on my radar.”

We sat in silence for a moment, Kim seemingly digesting everything I’d just dumped on her. She’d listened quietly, sympathetically, but now she looked like she was trying to find the most sensitive way of breaking something to me. Placing her hand on my knee, she asked gently, “Didn’t you know something was up when he didn’t even do anything for you tonight, Mac? Flowers, or a gift, or even a phone call?”

I stared at her, perplexed.

“Mackenzie,” she said softly. “It was Valentine’s Day.” Without thinking, I pulled out my BlackBerry to check the date. February 15, 1:15
A.M
. A fresh wave of grief washed over me as I collapsed back on the couch, stuffing my BlackBerry back in my pocket. How could I have let my personal life fall so far down my list of priorities that I didn’t even notice my boyfriend hadn’t bothered to contact me on Valentine’s Day? I’d essentially been dumped and completely missed it.

“That fucker,” I wailed.

Kim chuckled, nodding. “I know, sweetie.” She put her hands on my shoulders and made full force eye contact. “He
is
a fucker, Mac. And you should consider it a good thing that it’s over. You just got a Get Out of Jail Free card.”

I pulled my knees to my chest. For a moment we were both quiet. “I should just cash that stupid check he gave me,” I muttered, breaking the silence.

Kim stared at me, perplexed.

“Mr. Money Bags wrote me a check for twenty thousand dollars back when he wanted me to break my lease and move in with him,” I explained.

Kim’s eyes widened. “And you still have it?”

I nodded.

“What are you waiting for? Cash that sucker and let’s get on a plane!”

I wiped away the tears and managed a smile. “Tempting, but might be a tad drastic in my current condition.”

“Fine, but having the chance to take twenty thousand dollars from a boyfriend who you’ve just caught cheating on you is the dream of every scorned woman.”

“I know.” I exhaled a shuddery breath.

“Does he have any of his stuff at your apartment?”

“I think so,” I answered, realizing I’d been at my apartment so seldom lately that I wouldn’t have noticed if he’d already cleaned out his things.

“I’ll box it up and drop it off for you. And if you have stuff over there I’ll tell him to just chuck it. It’s better that way. Trust me. In my experience, the only way to truly end a relationship is to flee like a refugee with nothing but the shirt on your back.”

I nodded, wishing it felt as easy as it sounded.

“I can’t believe you
finally
went to confront Sarah. I’m proud of you.” She patted my knee.

Her name hit my ears with a thud. I’d been so focused on the demise of my relationship and feelings of betrayal and humiliation that I’d completely forgotten there was a face to the other woman. Sarah.

“Kim, how am I going to face her at work without losing my mind?” My voice was small as I hugged my knees, swiping my hands across my eye.

“The question you should be asking is how is she going to face
you
? She screwed someone else’s boyfriend in her office on Valentine’s Day. I mean, how depraved is that? He obviously doesn’t give a shit about her and she knows that. Sarah will always be a lonely old hag screwing another woman’s man.” She stood up and grabbed a wineglass from the cupboard of her tiny kitchen, raising her eyebrows in a question. She poured me a glass without waiting for an answer. It was then that I realized I wasn’t the only one here without a Valentine’s date.

“Hey, where’s Quinn?” I asked as she handed me my glass.

She took a long, purposeful gulp. “We broke up. About a week ago.”

“What? You guys broke up? Why?”

She shrugged, avoiding my stare. “Because guys are assholes—not a big shocker.” Her tone was light, but her voice shook. I digested this for a moment, picturing Quinn doing any one of the horrible things guys do to earn the title of “asshole”—lie, cheat (quite familiar with that one now), disrespect, flake out—I just couldn’t imagine Quinn doing any of them. He was enamored with Kim. Contrary to what she said, it
was
a shocker. I thought back to all the times in the past I’d seen Kim after she’d had her heart broken by her latest loser boyfriend. There was a certain look about her I could always recognize. It wasn’t sad. It was more like defiant. As if she was challenging me to question whether she was
really
fine, as she claimed she was. Studying her now, she looked sad and lonely, almost depressed. Glancing down at the nearly empty bottle of wine on the coffee table, I realized she’d been drinking even before I arrived. My beautiful, dynamic best friend was drinking alone on Valentine’s evening. Why didn’t she call me? Then it occurred to me: Why didn’t she even tell me they broke up?

“Kim, why —”

“Come on,” she interrupted, standing up abruptly. “Insomnia Cookies is still open. Let’s go drown our sorrows in chocolate chips
and peanut butter. And no heart-shaped ones.” I could see her bottom lip quivering slightly.

I looked down at the time on her cable box and, like a knee jerking when a doctor’s hammer hits, reflexively pulled out my BlackBerry to check my email.

What I
should
have done was toss my BlackBerry into my wineglass, walk to Second Avenue with Kim, and exchange sad break-up tales while letting the chocolate and sugar work their magic. But I didn’t do that. Instead, I took a taxi back to the office, because that’s the mentality that got me through law school and into this job. Work beckoned, and grudgingly, I answered the call. I think the only person more disappointed than I was that Ben was churning out documents on Valentine’s evening was Mrs. Ben Girardi. Somewhere, she was swilling some tequila and popping a Valentine’s Day happy pill. I was wishing I had one myself.

I
SHIFTED NERVOUSLY IN
my seat, checking my watch for the fifth time in five minutes. Why was I so anxious? It was just Alex. We’d met for drinks countless times in the past, just the two of us. But tonight felt different somehow. It had been almost a week since I’d walked in on Jason and Sarah and I hadn’t seen Alex in that time. He was still stuck in purgatory so I shouldn’t have taken it personally, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that he was avoiding me. Not that I’d had much time for chatting anyway. The past week had passed in a robotic haze. I arrived at work every morning at 7
A.M
. and worked all day, eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner in my office or the war room. At 2
A.M
. I took a Town Car home, had the driver wait outside while I went upstairs to sleep for four hours, shower, and get dressed, then took the waiting car back to work. And the whole routine started again. No need to waste a minute of my time hailing a cab.

It’s amazing how much money you can save when you don’t pay for any food, transportation, or entertainment. I even expensed my dry cleaning. Lawyers did that all the time when they didn’t have time to go home and change. There was a one hour dry cleaner in the basement of the building specifically for that purpose. Technically speaking, I wasn’t sleeping in the office, but I still felt I deserved to have the client foot the bill for cleaning my clothes. They were the ones making me sweat. In my new Biglaw reality I was simply utilizing the resources available to me.

My schedule allowed me to hide from pretty much everyone but Patrick, Gavin, and Sheldon. They were the only co-workers I had to face because we were still living like one big dysfunctional family in the war room. We had the occasional fire drill, but I hadn’t had to pull out the compressed air canister. Thankfully.

In the light of day I did feel a little guilty about the whole incident. I mean, if you’d told me a year ago I would use an air canister as a motivation tool, I would have thought you were crazy. But it’s like those people whose airplane crashed in the Arctic and they ended up eating each other to stay alive. I bet if you’d asked them a year before that, they’d swear that they’d never resort to cannibalism. But they did, and so had I. Gavin never mentioned it. It was just one of those things that happen in the heat of the moment that you don’t dare share with outsiders. Like the travelers on that doomed flight, we knew outsiders wouldn’t understand. I remember the time Patrick angrily knocked his computer off the table in the war room, sending it tumbling to the ground. He told us all to go fuck ourselves and stormed out before returning calmly thirty minutes later like nothing had happened. Our collective story to IT: the computer fell. Nobody ever talked about the outburst after that. What happens among the deal team stays among the deal team. It was like some code of silence that we all understood. And lucky for me, the air canister incident fell under that umbrella, too.

I knew they’d heard about Jason. How could they not have, with the rumors that were flying around? But they didn’t address it, at least not verbally. One night Patrick added a piece of cheesecake to the regular dinner order and solemnly slid it across the table to me. We locked eyes and I nodded a thank you for the conciliatory gesture. And that was that.

Just as I was analyzing how best to handle the whole Jason topic with Alex, I noticed him entering the bar. Spotting me, he smiled and made his way over. I subconsciously smoothed my hair and swiped under my eyes, ensuring they had not morphed into raccoon eyes. “Well, look who’s been sprung from purgatory,” I joked, standing up to greet him.

“Brought back to life!” He held his hands up triumphantly. “If only for an hour.” He hailed the waitress and ordered an Old Fashioned.

“How very Don Draper of you.”

“And I plan on knocking it back just as quickly as he does.” He flopped into the chair across from mine, looking paler and flabbier than I’d seen him in the past. Spending his days and nights under fluorescent lights, eating greasy dinners topped off with ice cream bars at two in the morning, did not agree with him.

“You’ll have to wash it down with some Red Bull if you’re headed back to the printers.”

“Yeah,” Alex responded distractedly, his eyes darting around the room. I was sure he was avoiding meeting my eyes because he didn’t know how to broach the Jason topic. He was going to either (a) tell me he had no idea or (b) profusely apologize for keeping Jason’s dirty little secret. So long as he didn’t throw in something like “bros before hos,” I planned on forgiving him.

“Is everything okay?” I prompted.

“Listen, Mac.” He blew out a breath of air, his face growing serious. “I saw something today.”

“Alex.” I held up my hand to stop him. “I already know about Jason and Sarah.”

He shook his head. “It’s not that. But I promise you I had no idea about that. None. This is about something else.” He chewed the side of his thumb.

“Okay.” I picked up my glass and took a sip, thankful we weren’t going to have to talk about Jason. I’d resolutely decided that there wasn’t the option to wallow in my misery. I had enough on my plate to worry about with the signing of Highlander around the corner, and there was no way I was going to let Jason or Sarah or anyone get in the way of that. “What’s it about, then?”

He wiped his palms on his pants. He had the pained expression of a police officer knocking on a door at two in the morning, about to break the tragic news that “
there’s been an accident
.”

My heart was beating fast now.

“My secretary was working on a document for Saul and I saw your name on it.”

“Geez, Alex, you scared the crap out of me!” I put my palm to my chest in relief. “I thought you were going to tell me somebody died or you were just fired.”

“Well, I’m not but you might be.” His voice trembled slightly.

The look on his face was unnerving me. “What are you talking about?”

Alex raked his fingers through his hair. “Mac, what did you mean when you said you wished there was an easier way? On New Year’s.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” My tone was stern now. Whatever this was, it was getting irritating.

Alex looked around the room before leaning in conspiratorially. “The document with your name was F&D’s response to an SEC inquiry. They wanted a list of employees who had billed time to five different deals.”

“Five deals?” The SEC wouldn’t ask for a list of insiders from five deals at one time as part of standard practice. That meant they thought there had been insider trading in five different stocks and F&D was counsel on all of them. That was far from standard.

“Mackenzie.” Alex dropped his voice to a whisper. “You were the only associate who worked on all five deals.”

“Wait a minute. Are you asking me if I’ve been insider trading?” I asked incredulously.

“I know you wouldn’t do that, but at New Year’s you said you were looking for an easier way.”

“I meant I wanted to work less! I didn’t mean I was turning into a real life Gordon Gekko! Geez, Alex, do you know me at all?”

For a moment we were both silent. “I do know you, Mac,” Alex finally said, staring down at his glass. “But I also know that Biglaw is like Guantanamo. Nobody comes out of here the same person who went in.”

“That may be true, but do you really think I did this? Morphed into a white collar criminal?”

“No!” The crease of worry deepened in his brow. “I saw your name on the paper and it freaked me out, Mac,” he said softly. “I think you might be in trouble.”

My brain was fuzzy from lack of sleep—there was surely something that I was too slow to understand, something that would make this make sense. “Was there any other associate that worked on all five deals?”

He shook his head, biting his lower lip.

Images of every legal thriller I’d ever read began blurring together—extortion, set-up, arrests, murder. I pressed my fingers to my brow bone to stop my overactive imagination. It was not farfetched to think that if someone picked five deals at random that F&D had acted on in the past year, one associate would’ve worked on all five. All it showed is that I’ve worked on a lot of deals. Alex was probably just making a huge deal out of something innocuous. But I was having the same feeling in my gut that I’d ignored for the last month of dating Jason. The feeling that something was off. Really off.

“Do you think I’m being set up or something?” As it came out of my mouth I almost felt embarrassed for sounding so theatrical.

“I have no idea,” Alex responded. “But if I were you I’d keep my head down and my eye out for anything unusual.”

I nodded. An impossible task in an environment where nothing is normal.

Keeping my head down proved easy as I continued to be snowed under with work for Highlander. But I might have been taking Alex’s advice too literally one morning when, on the way back from the coffee room, I almost bumped into a whistling Ben Girardi.

“Glad to see you getting caffeinated — it’s going to be a
big
day,” he said cheerfully. “We’re down to one final point left to negotiate, so it’s finally time to get some signatures.” He rubbed his hands together gleefully.

“Wow, that’s great,” I said with as much enthusiasm as my voice was capable of before my morning coffee. I used to imagine the signing of a purchase agreement looking something like this: A CEO outfitted in a $5,000 suit from Savile Row sitting in a cavernous forty-second floor windowed conference room, sterling silver Tiffany pen perched over a signature page, ready to sign and be met with a round of applause by surrounding lawyers and executives. In reality, the lawyers on each side gather the necessary signatures from their respective clients on separate signature pages a few days
in advance and when an agreement is finalized, a PDF copy of the signature page is exchanged via email. No pomp, no applause.

I silently decided I’d delegate the signature collecting to Patrick.

“Just one thing.” Ben looked around conspiratorially and lowered his voice. “The tax guys had to do some creative structuring for this deal to avoid the regulators.” I continued to listen as Ben explained that a new entity had been created to be the purchaser and Stuart Higgins was the only authorized signatory, meaning he was the only one who could sign the purchase agreement.

Even in my pre-caffeinated state my ears perked up. Stuart Higgins, the founder and head of Pegasus Partners, was worth billions and was a notorious recluse. He basically pulled the strings of his company from behind the scenes. Oren, his right-hand man, was the one that people dealt with. Mr. “Nobody can eat, shit, or sleep” was the face of the company; very rarely did anyone deal with Stuart directly. Only a few people that worked at F&D had ever even
seen
him.

“The signature from Stuart can be a little … tricky to obtain. I don’t want one of the first years given the task. I’m sure they’d fuck something up. I need
you
to do this.” Ben paused and looked at me like he was sending me out over the trenches, into an open field surrounded by enemy soldiers. “Probably the best way to get it is to go over there yourself and personally put the signature page in front of him.”

I nodded in agreement. “Sure, no problem,” I said calmly, like I did that sort of thing all the time. Inside I was bubbling with excitement. Sure, collecting signatures was a menial task, but I was going to be one of the select few that actually got to meet
Stuart Higgins
! A Master of the Universe. The man, the myth, the legend. It was like an actor meeting Marlon Brando or a baseball player meeting Babe Ruth.

“Great, just grab his secretary Carol’s number from Rita and make the arrangements with her.” He put his hand on my shoulder. “Good luck, Mackenzie.”

Out of the trenches, into the battlefield, I went.

“Hi Carol, this is Mackenzie calling from F&D.” I paused as I heard the clicking of her typing in the background. I took a deep breath
and dove in. “The reason I’m calling is I have a signature page that I need to have executed by Mr. Higgins. It’s for the Highlander deal. Is there a good time for me to come by and have him sign it?”