The Love Wars (2 page)

____

M
y descent down the rabbit hole into Bacon Payne’s matrimonial department began at approximately eleven in the morning two months before moving day at the Billings house. I had finished packing up the last crumbs from my desk in the corporate group (stapler, ficus, opened box of Thin Mints) and, Bankers Box carefully balanced on my forearms, took the elevator to the firm’s thirty-seventh floor.

When the doors opened, Kim, the matrimonial department’s secretary, was pacing back and forth, clutching a stack of files. I had seen her before; she was one of the smokers that huddled outside the firm’s service entrance, the group that Kevin, my former office mate, had dubbed “the Dementors.” The nickname was spot-on: the smokers clustered outside, miserably sucking down their cigarettes and creating a cloud of perpetual smoke, regardless of weather, time of day or, presumably, their workloads.

Although she had obviously been waiting for my arrival, Kim barely glanced at me as she shoved the files into my box, squashing my ficus in the process. “Getfamiliar.AnyquestionsaskLiz,” she said, her back already to me as she led me down a hallway and nodded into an office.

I peered into the empty office. “Is this—,” I started to ask, but Kim was already halfway down the hall.

My name, Molly Grant, was on the nameplate, so it probably was my office, I reasoned, and the one next door that read
ELIZABETH SHER
must be Liz’s. I glanced in to see a woman talking into one of those goofy headsets that always made me think of telephone operators in old movies.

“I know, Bob, I know,” she said, her hands waving as though he were in the room, “but that still doesn’t get to our issues with the holidays. Mmmm-hmmm. Yup. No, so what if she’s Jewish?” She shook her head emphatically, and her blond corkscrews bobbed along. “They celebrated Christmas with the kids
every single year
. It’s a family tradition. No, no, no—let me finish—Ruby should be able to continue the family traditions too.”

A few minutes later, Liz, apparently having resolved Ruby’s holiday plans, buzzed my intercom. “Molly,” she said, her shout floating through our common wall a beat ahead of her muffled voice on my speakerphone. “I’m finishing up some calls, but lunch when I’m done?”

“Okay,” I yelled in the direction of her office.

“Hi, Bill. Liz Sher,” I heard her say, her voice now sharp with purpose. “Listen, if you’re going to spend that much money on hookers, please use cash, not your credit card. It’s just bad planning.”

I suppressed a smile. If Bill and Ruby were reliable indicators of our clientele, I would not be bored.

When I graduated from law school, I thought corporate law sounded perfect: arm’s-length, sophisticated business transactions on behalf of anonymous institutions. It would be, Dean Laylor advised me, the best antidote to what he referred to as “that unfortunate clinic incident.”

And there was nowhere better to bury myself in the paperwork generated by sterile financial transactions than the corporate group of the Manhattan headquarters of Bacon, Buckley, Worthington & Payne, LLP.

Home of five hundred impeccably credentialed lawyers, Bacon Payne’s client list included behemoth global financial institutions, cutting-edge technology companies chockablock with newly minted millionaires, and the rulers of several obscenely wealthy foreign nations. Bacon Payne’s plush Park Avenue offices boasted an art gallery, complete with an original Miró, a state-of-the-art gym and a dining room (not cafeteria, mind you). Year after year, its attorneys received the highest compensation in Manhattan.

The day after I received my offer, Tara Parker, my law school’s director of career services, who clipped around the halls like a championship mall-walker, tracked me down in the library. She leaned her blond-cropped head close to mine and said in a stage whisper, “Well, this is it, honey. Your life is about to start.”

I met the gaze of her fiercely mascaraed eyes and felt her words in my soul. This must be what I had been working so hard for all of my life.

Right before she walked away, she patted my arm. “Have you seen their Miró?”

I shook my head.

She rolled her eyes. “Exquisite.”

Five months and twenty-nine days after starting, I recognized that I’d made a mistake. I had just spent an all-nighter summarizing the contents of thirty-six Bankers Boxes filled with mind-numbing financials related to the sale of a German poultry feed company. When I finally presented my memo to a partner named Doug King, he yelled at me for twenty minutes for the unforgivable crime of spelling “document” as “dicament” on
page 4
.

I stood stone-faced through his diatribe—even nodding occasionally to affirm a few insults of which Doug King seemed especially proud—but immediately afterward I ducked into a secluded internal stairwell and burst into tears. My big problem wasn’t just that Doug King (who I later learned was nicknamed
Douche King) had called me “lazy,” “stupid” and “the face of Bacon Payne’s lowered hiring standards.” Nor was it that I was exhausted enough to hallucinate tiny brown floating bugs around my peripheral vision. It was that I didn’t give a flying fig about any of the work I had done since starting at the firm.

At that point, it might have made sense to look for another job, but I dug in my heels. I had to stay. Not for the salary, although Bacon Payne paid more than any other firm, but for what some starry-eyed associate had dubbed the “Payne-ment.” Every Bacon Payne associate who came in as a first-year and made it to his or her fifth anniversary in good standing was given a whopper of a lump-sum bonus, equal to one entire year in salary.

The second I heard about the Payne-ment, I did some quick calculations—all Bacon Payne associates did at some point—and realized that if I was diligent about paying off my student loans the first five years, I could easily knock off the rest with the bonus. Five years after law school, I could be free to do whatever I wanted.

To be honest, my fantasy was only planned up to the part where I lassoed the American Dream for the Grant Family by paying off my parents’ home equity line of credit, a loan they’d taken out nine years before to finance my college tuition. I was fuzzy on the details, but with the three of us debt free, I was sure the rest would fall into place and I hung tight, sloughing through three interminably boring years. Until I realized that there was a better way to wait out my sentence at Bacon Payne.

I’d been on the elevator after yet another all-nighter, desperately wanting a shower—it was one of those sticky July days and I felt incredibly smelly and greasy-haired. Factsination!—the news and information service that was helpfully displayed 24-7 on monitors on our elevators—made me yearn for the days of Muzak. The word of the day, the screen informed me, was
paroxysm
, as in
Mr. Smith had a paroxysm of rage when he saw all the work still on his desk.

I stopped myself from flipping off the screen as the doors opened on the thirty-seventh floor. A female attorney stepped in, looking so crisp: showered, clean and downright elegant.

“I still can’t believe that,” she said to her companion, an older woman in a proper pink suit whom I took to be a client. “He claimed ignorance to every question: how much he made, what his credit bills totaled, the purchase price of the ski house. I’ve never taken a deposition like that.”

“I told you he was slimy and evasive,” said the client. “Will this hurt us?”

“Not at all, Joyce.” Crisp lawyer’s voice rang with confidence as she looked sternly at the client, her voice ringing with confidence. “We’re right where we want to be.”

I was stunned. My own days were filled with nebulous orders barked down a chain of command from partner to senior associate to midlevel associate to me. It was like the childhood game of telephone with the punch line being that billions of dollars were at stake. Meanwhile, this lawyer, this clean and well-groomed junior associate who looked not much older than I, had been advising actual human beings and taking depositions—something I’d only seen on television.

I had always sort of thought of the matrimonial group with a touch of distaste, like distant relatives whom you had to invite to Christmas dinner, but inevitably got a little too drunk and messed up the Heritage Village arrangement. But maybe I had gotten it all wrong. Maybe it was the place to be, the most exciting department at Bacon Payne.

Lillian Starling led the group and her name was constantly in the gossip magazines because of her high-profile cases. I was thrilled each time I spotted one of her rich and famous clients in person. We all were: every so often, one of the other associates would rush down the hall, stick his head in one of our offices and whisper, for example, when the star of that TV show
Night Wings
was there, “Dana Carter, in reception on thirty-three,
now
.” This year alone, I had pretended to nonchalantly walk by the reception area to see a Brazilian pop star (great skin), a two-time Oscar winner (much shorter in person than in his films) and one of New York’s senators (flagrant nose-picker), all waiting for Lillian Starling.

So, I embarked on “Operation Transfer” (Kevin, a firm believer in nicknames, also deserved naming credit for that one). I hounded Lionel Baird, the corporate group’s assigning partner, for work involving the matrimonial group. He had looked a little concerned, as though he was missing something—most corporate associates were not eager to do divorce work, which at Bacon Payne had all the cachet of ambulance chasing—but a few weeks later, he knocked on my door with an assignment: Rick Roth had retained Lillian Starling for his divorce. One of Mr. Roth’s big problems was his wife’s claims that Rick’s company, Little Miss Fancy—a girls’ clothing company based, Lionel had said, on the “puked-up tutu aesthetic”—was marital property. Lillian, in order to understand the worth of Little Miss Fancy, needed a corporate associate to cull through the company’s financial records.

I culled. And after I spent an entire month of eighteen-hour days sorting and organizing and sorting some more, one of Lillian’s associates, a first-year named Denise, quit, and I was invited to take her spot.

I had to reassure Lionel Baird that no, I had not been hit on the head, nor was I under duress; I did genuinely want to transfer to the matrimonial group and yes, it would mean the world to me if he could advise Dominic Pizaro, the head of corporate, to sign off on the move. (Dominic himself would not have an opinion about this; to Dominic, junior associates were as indistinguishable as one ridged potato chip from the rest of its bag mates—just another snack that might break on its way to being eaten.)

And so, I felt a warped joy upon hearing Liz reprimand her client about his escort fees: it meant I was finally on the right track.

__________

A
few hours later, I sat at one of the booths in the Bacon Payne dining room with Liz and Rachel Stanton, another matrimonial associate.

“So tell us,” said Rachel, sinking in the seat across from me. “How it went down.”

I summarized my role on the Little Miss Fancy assignment and Liz swallowed a forkful of penne. “You must have done one heck of a job with that due diligence.”

“I also sort of made a personal appeal to Lillian about how much I wanted to be in this group.”

Early one evening during my third week of work on the Roth case, I was bracing myself to open yet another one of the forty boxes, wondering whether my daily headaches indicated the return of my caffeine addiction when Lillian Starling breezed in.

“This is Little Miss Fancy?” Her sharp brown eyes darted around the room, taking in the stacks of boxes and barely glancing at me. I jumped up from my chair with astonishing torque considering the cushy depth of the leather seat.

This was the closest I had been to Lillian. I towered over her even with the lift that her voluminous brown hair gave her—the side effect of the extra inches offered by her hair was a dwarfing of her face, which looked disproportionately tiny, like a Monchhichi doll. And that hair! Expertly layered and blown out, it had every shade of brown I could imagine: highlights of caramel, copper, ash brown, chocolate, chestnut, fawn and russet. I could tell that had I read
Vogue
with the zeal that I reserved for
People
, I would have been able to quickly identify the designers responsible for her expensive nubby black and oatmeal suit and and heels.

“Hi, Ms. Starling. I’m Molly Grant, the corporate associate assigned to the case. Can I help you find anything?”

“Yes, we have a financial statement due to the court this week and we need some of the tax returns and registers….” Her back was to me and she started impatiently lifting the lids off the boxes without looking at their contents, “Oh, God. Is this in any kind of order at all?”

“Here, let me show you.” I quickly lifted two of the boxes, plunked them down on the table and handed her a manila folder from the side of one. “Copies of the tax returns and financial reports from the years prior to and immediately after the marriage, as well as the date of commencement of the action. And this memo summarizes all of the numbers. The backup documentation is in here.”

Lillian glanced at the folder, her face impassive. And right then, at that exact moment, my parents called, the conference room’s ordinary soundtrack—layers of sterile HVAC system white noise—suddenly pierced by the loud and twangy string chords that kick off Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama.” Lillian’s head jerked up from the memo. I intoned seven
I’m sorry
s in a meditative chant and rushed to turn off the phone, honestly believing in that moment that getting a personal call at seven o’clock at night indicated severe perversions in my character.

Lillian gave a shave of a nod—dipping her eyelids, not her chin—but it was, I knew, a miniature stamp of approval. “I like that song,” she said distractedly, and I could not determine which had won her over: my snap to attention or my taste in Southern rock.

Her eyes returned to the memo and she said, “Helpful,” confirming it by opening the flap on her Birkin bag and sliding in the document. Emboldened, I started talking. “Actually, Ms. Starling, I’ve sorted almost everything, so let me know if you
need anything else. Also, I just wanted to say—thanks for the opportunity. This is really interesting work and I’m actually a big fan of yours. I would love to work on more matrimonial cases with you if you ever need me.” The words had poured out in an obvious and desperate attempt to force a connection between us.