Scot on the Rocks (6 page)

H
aving only two weeks to go before the wedding in which to win Douglas back, I got to work immediately the following morning. Douglas hadn’t e-mailed me back yet from the other day, but that didn’t matter. First order of business — call him at work, tell him I forgive him and I am ready to move on. A phone call would be much better than sending an e-mail I wouldn’t even know if he ever received. For all I know, that last e-mail could be lost somewhere in cyberspace.

I picked up the phone and, as it began to ring, a smile came to my face. This was easy. Now, why hadn’t I thought of this sooner? It felt good to be proactive. Peace and order would be restored to the universe, at this pace, by lunchtime — 1:00 p.m., the latest. God, I’m good.

“This is Brooke calling,” I said to Douglas’s secretary. Dead silence on the line. “Brooke Miller,” I explained, “his
girl
friend.” Close enough, right? “What’s that?” I asked. “He’s in a meeting? All right then. When do you expect him to be back?…Oh, you’re not sure…. Okay.”

So, he was in a meeting. A minor glitch. That was all right, though, Rome wasn’t built in a day. And it most certainly wasn’t built in two hours. I could wait.

When I hadn’t heard back by eleven, I decided to give him a call again. After all, how long could his meeting really take? In the course of the two years that I’d been with Douglas, I never really figured out precisely what it was that he did for a living. I just knew that it was something financial that entailed the wearing of expensive custom-made Italian suits.

“Oh, he’ll be back at one?” I said, tapping my pen on the tip of my desk. “I’ll call him then.”

Back at one? That was okay. It would be a good opportunity to get some work done. What with the stress of the whole breakup and all, my billables really had been quite low. Time for the big-time lawyer to earn her big-time salary. First order of business, some computer research for the Healthy Foods case. I was such a woman of the millennium — multitasking at its best. I would get back my man
and
get some quality billable hours in. All in one morning. God, I’m good.

Two hours later, I hadn’t done an ounce of billable work, but I did manage to pick up some killer boots on sale at Saks. What? If I was going to get back my man, I’d have to look good!

“Oh, he’s out to lunch now?” I said to Douglas’s secretary at 1:00 p.m. “Got it. And, when do you expect him back exactly?” Tap, tap, tap.

“What has that pen ever done to you?” Jack asked, appearing in my doorway just as I slammed the phone down. “Let’s go pick up something for lunch.”

“Okay,” I said, “but only if it’s quick. I have a lot of work to do. Which you should know, since you assigned it to me.”

“And who do we bill shopping at Saks to these days?” he asked. Note to self: must seriously consider moving computer screen so that it is out of the eyeshot of office visitors. Have been meaning to do so ever since a partner caught me reading a forwarded e-mail entitled:
Ladies, Learn to Love Your Fat Rolls,
but I forgot. Now, moving the computer screen was definitely in order.

“I wasn’t shopping at Saks,” I informed Jack, minimizing the screen as I did. “I was at Saks
dot com.
Big difference. In fact, sometimes there is entirely different merchandise on the Web site. You really need to be more precise if you want to be a good litigator, you know.”

“Duly noted,” he said as he motioned for me to come with him with a flick of his wrist.

“And anyway,” I said, grabbing my pocketbook from underneath my desk, “I suppose that it would be the same billing code that you and your friends use for your fantasy football league.” (Because I already
was
a good litigator.)

“Clever,” Jack said, opening the door to my office for me and following me out. “But the relationships I foster with my colleagues will pay off later tenfold. A fantasy football league is the equivalent of playing golf with your business contacts. You see, all of those lawyers at various large firms throughout the city will someday be CEOs, CFOs and in-house counsel to some of the country’s largest and most important corporations. And when the time comes, I won’t even need to go out looking for business — the business will simply come to me. All because of my fantasy football league. So, I should really be billing that to client development.”

“Wow,” I said as Jack stuck his arm out to hold the elevator door open for me.

“You see, Brooke, I already am an
excellent
litigator,” he said, and pressed the button for the lobby. Touché. “So, what do you feel like eating?”

“I’ll have whatever you want,” I replied. “I’m easy.”

“I was going to get a chicken parm sub at the pub around the corner. You feel like a sub?”

“How about sushi?” I asked.

We walked into the sushi place around the corner and I promptly informed Jack that I did not have time to eat there — we would have to get our orders to go — because I had so much work to do. That he had assigned me. (Read: go back to the office and call Douglas again.) But then Jack pointed out that sushi really is best when it’s fresh. Which is totally true. So, we got a table near the window and sat down to eat. But I ate very, very quickly because, as I told Jack, I really, truly, deeply wanted to get back to the office to get my work done. That he had assigned me. Because really, I can be very conscientious when I want to be.

After a much-needed lunch break with Jack (What? Getting back your man can be hard work!), I got back to my desk at 2:00 p.m., and Douglas’s secretary’s story had not changed. I was perplexed. If Douglas had so many meetings, how did the man find the time to meet another woman, start dating said other woman, fall in love and get engaged? That guy really knew how to manage his time.

As I plotted out my next move, the phone rang. I checked the caller ID and it came up as Anonymous. I normally don’t pick up the telephone at work unless I recognize the number, preferring instead to let my secretary pick it up and announce the caller, but Douglas’s calls usually came in as Anonymous, so I dove for the phone.

“Brooke Miller,” I said, trying to sound sweet and professional, like the kind of woman a man would most definitely want to get back together with and take to her ex-boyfriend’s wedding.

“Hi, is this Brooke Miller?” a voice asked. I didn’t recognize it. I couldn’t believe I’d wasted a good “Brooke Miller” on a voice I didn’t recognize.

“Yes,” I said, already flipping my computer screen back on and checking my e-mail.

“My name is Jessica Shevitz Rauch and I do attorney placement. Do you have some time now to talk?”

It’s such a funny question to ask a litigator when she’s at work. Time to talk. A litigator
never
has time to talk unless it’s billable. Granted, I hadn’t done any billable work all day, but the point was that I did not, in fact, have time to talk to this woman. My nonbillable time today was being spent on plotting ways to get back my man and shopping online for outfits that would assist me in getting back said man.

And I love the term
attorney placement.
It’s as if they think that even though you’re smart enough to graduate law school, pass the New York bar and become an attorney, you won’t get the fact that they’re headhunters. Headhunters start calling attorneys at big firms the minute you walk in the door, offering promises of smaller firms with better hours and perfect in-house counsel positions at prestigious corporations. It’s good to know there are options, but more often than not the headhunters just want to move you to some other big firm and take their thirty-percent cut of your vastly overblown salary.

“Sorry, I don’t have the time,” I said, picking up a nail file from my desk and fixing a crack in my thumbnail.

“Maybe some other time?” she asked. “Let me ask you, are you still happy at Gilson Hecht?”

“Yes,” I said, “for now I am. But, I suppose you can always hold on to my number. Thanks for calling.”

I hung up the phone and realized that I filed my thumbnail into a strange hexagonal shape. Figuring that I had the rest of the evening to get some really good billable work done/get back my man, I dashed out to the nail place around the corner from my office.

Five o’clock — one manicure, pedicure and ten-minute mini-massage later — and Douglas’s secretary was still standing firm. I should never have encouraged him to get her such an expensive Christmas gift last year. If I’d let him give her the $10 Godiva truffles he wanted to give instead of insisting on the $100 facial gift certificate at Elizabeth Arden, I’d be talking to Douglas right now.

Tap, tap, tap.

Tap, tap, tap, splat! All over my best going out/getting back your man pants. Ugh. No wonder my dry cleaner wears a fur coat in the winter. It’s not what you’re thinking, though. It was one of those fancy desk pens. I think that they are, by their very nature, much more delicate than those regular pens.

Six o’clock and at last, I got a different story from the gate-keeper. Douglas was (finally!) not in another meeting. He had left for the day. I threw a Bic across my office, hitting the door. (It didn’t break. I told you so.)

One more nonbillable hour later, at 7:00 p.m., I decided to call him at home. That was it! I would leave him a sweet, sexy message saying that I forgave him, and suggest that to celebrate, we should go to California for Trip’s wedding. Perfect. I shut the door to my office and practiced what I would say to the answering machine.

I dialed the number — my old phone number — and waited for the answering machine to pick up. I knew that he wouldn’t be home since he usually met up with clients for drinks after work. He didn’t have a cell phone that I could call because he didn’t own one. Douglas considered using cell phones rude. Now, I can’t help but laugh — apparently for Douglas, speaking on a cell phone in public is rude, but sleeping with another woman when you’re living with someone else is, on the other hand, perfectly acceptable in polite society.

“Hello?” a female voice answered. Who the hell was picking up our telephone? Someone had broken into our apartment. I had to call the police! “Police, a cat burglar has broken into my old apartment, and is answering the phone!”

“Gilson Hecht?” the cat burglar asked into the phone. How did she know where I was calling from? My goodness, the burglar was psychic! “Police, a
psychic
cat burglar has broken into my old apartment!”

Using my superlitigator powers of deduction, I soon realized that the firm’s name and number must have come up on caller ID. I quickly hung up the phone as Beryl was still saying “Hello? Hello?” (Yes, my super litigator skills told me that, too.)

Beryl. Is that woman using my phone? The very phone I bought for Douglas? Well, didn’t exactly buy for him, but the phone I totally used when I lived there! Has she moved in already? God, that man moves fast! He and I at least waited a month!

By 7:30 p.m., I had plan B in effect: I would reconvene a special court session at our local watering hole to discuss the matter further and figure out a plan C. Yes, plan B consisted solely of gathering the troops — Vanessa and Jack — but give me a break! I was under a lot of stress here!

After picking Vanessa up at her office, we sneaked down the back stairwell so as to avoid any partners who might catch us leaving before we had actually collapsed from exhaustion. We got to the gym at Public School 142 just in time to slip in for the last few minutes of the firm intramural basketball game against the lawyers from Arby Schweitzer.

The bleachers were completely empty, so Vanessa and I took front-row seats. The gym floor was scattered with briefcases and Redwelds full of documents with a row of BlackBerries lined up perfectly on the front-row bench. Jack’s BlackBerry stood out in the crowd since one of his nieces had decorated it with Strawberry Shortcake stickers so that he would never lose it.

Vanessa sat down on the bleachers quietly and tucked her bag underneath her legs. I, on the other hand, sat down and knocked over the entire row of BlackBerries, which fell tumbling to the gymnasium floor like a set of very expensive dominoes. None of the Gilson Hecht associates seemed to care, since our firm pays for its unfettered 24/7 access to its associates, but judging from the looks on the Arby Schweitzer team’s faces, I got the feeling that their firm did not. As I crawled on the floor picking them up as subtly as I could, I saw Jack give me a tiny smile and a slight wave. He was wearing a Gilson Hecht T-shirt with a long sleeve T-shirt underneath and had the sleeves pushed all the way up to his elbows. Jack had a million freckles covering his arms, but barely any on his face.

The score was tied and there were just a few minutes left on the clock. I puzzled over Jack’s choice of crunch-time lineup: rounding out his usual starters (the two other attorneys in our department who were over six feet tall), he had Billie Cooper, a fourth-year corporate associate and Bob Frohman, a second-year tax associate, on the court.

While Billie Cooper was the tallest girl in the entire corporate department standing at five foot nine, I knew that she frequented the nail place around the corner from our office almost as often as I did. Now, I’m no basketball player, but I’m pretty sure that you need to use your hands to do it. Although I did meet Michael Jordan once and he had lovely hands. But, I digress.

Bob Frohman from tax was so timid, I could swear that I’d never actually heard him speak. And I had a sneaking suspicion that half of the tax department hadn’t, either. At five foot four, even Billie was taller than him. When I would pass him in the hallways at work, he always looked as if he was terrified of his own shadow. At a large law firm, that sort of thing could be considered normal what with how stressful the work is, but Bob looked that way all the time. I once saw him at another tax associate’s birthday party and there he stood, in a corner all night, looking downright scared, speaking to no one the entire time. I imagined that if you ever did speak to him, no sound would come out of his mouth. Or, if it did, he would have nothing else to discuss but the Internal Revenue Code. I could not, for the life of me, figure out why Jack had put him in the game at such a crucial moment.