“What?” he asked.
“Oh, just look at her feet, man. Run while you have the chance!”
“You are a frustrated actor, Jackie….” I explained, hanging a little too long on the pronunciation of each word. The sweet talk is a quintessential part of the look. Although I wouldn’t recommend using that part at the post office. For the post office, the mere look itself usually suffices.
But it was true. Jack was one of those lawyers who started out thinking that it was a day job (never mind those silly people who actually dream of becoming a lawyer). Jack made a deal with himself (and his father) after graduating college with a joint degree in drama and English — he would give his childhood dream of acting two years. If he wasn’t a success (read: couldn’t pay the rent on his fifth-floor walk-up studio apartment), he would go to law school and become a lawyer like his father, the federal judge for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, wanted him to be. Even though he spent his two years after graduation waiting tables and going on countless auditions, he never made it big, getting only enough jobs to give him hope, but not enough to actually pay his bills. To his father’s delight, Jack reluctantly made good on his end of the deal and went to law school once his two years were up.
Jack enrolled in his father’s alma mater and didn’t look back, throwing himself into the law as vehemently as he did everything else in his life. I always thought that he had to throw himself in with as much vigor as he could in order to make himself forget that it wasn’t what he truly wanted to do. He made Law Review, Moot Court, got his Student Note published, and was the president of the Student Bar Association. And he somehow still managed to be in the top ten percent of his class. Vanessa and I made Law Review at our law school, too, but it was only because we didn’t do anything else besides study. And shop for shoes, but back then, such trips were considerably less intense than they are nowadays, what with our student budgets. What? You need to release your law-school stress somehow.
But Jack still was — and I guess probably always would be, beneath the navy sports jacket — an actor at heart. In going to law school, he discovered that the natural place for any frustrated actor is in the courtroom. He became a litigator in the vain hope that someday he would be in a courtroom where he could dramatically yell: “I’m out of order? You’re out of order! This whole courtroom is out of order!” (When in reality, we litigators know that it’s much more likely that you’d exclaim: “You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth!”)
“Let me get this straight,” Jack said. “I told you that I would save the day and go with you to this wedding.”
“Yes,” I said.
“And you said no,” he said.
“Well, if you want to be technical about it,” I said. I couldn’t believe he was being so difficult. Didn’t he feel bad about the whole kissing-a-junior-associate thing? How quickly they forget. Men can be so insensitive sometimes.
“But now you want to go to this wedding with me, pretending to be Douglas?”
“Did we not explain the power of an accent to you? Anyway, Trip is expecting me and my skirt-wearing boyfriend, not me and some other guy.”
“No way in hell,” he said, turning away. He grabbed his shot of Southern Comfort and downed it.
“Come on! It would be a great role for you. Great practice.”
“Brooke, you have officially lost your mind,” Vanessa offered.
“And offended me,” Jack offered, but neither of us was really listening to him.
“Pleeeeease?”
“Luckily for me, I don’t act anymore,” Jack said, brushing his shaggy hair out of his eyes. Was that his strongest argument? He was going to have to try harder than that.
“Pretty pleeeeease?”
“And even if I did, I certainly would never condescend to play Douglas of all people,” he said.
“Pretty pleeeeease with sugar on top?”
“That fact, coupled with the fact that I also hate L.A., makes it highly unlikely that you will be able, within the course of the next two weeks, to convince me to go with you to L.A. and perpetrate a fraud on the entire Scottish community.”
“So your answer is no?” I asked, eyelashes batting. For the record, I never had this much trouble at the post office.
“No,” he said, turning away from me and leaving the table for effect.
Famous last words.
8
“So, how long have you two been married?” a very old man with a neon-blue mohawk asked us. I think he was the owner of the shop.
“We’re not,” I said, looking at Jack and laughing. He smiled back at me, tugging at the kilt he had just tried on.
“If we’re not,” Jack whispered a little too close to my ear, “then how’d you manage to get me out of my pants?”
“Like it was difficult,” I said back, pushing him away from me, still looking at him in the mirror. I was trying not to stare too hard at his bare legs.
Stop staring at Jack’s legs.
I instead focused upon the fact that the firm “frowns upon” (read: fires) associates who date one another. Ever since those two summer associates got caught in a compromising position in the cafeteria late one night and that lovely rumor made its way into the New York Law Journal (Gilson Hecht Summer Associates Make the Most of Their Summer Associate Experience, the headline read), the firm has been hypersensitive about associates dating and the reputation the firm might derive therefrom. Since then, any time the firm got the slightest hint of impropriety among associates, Danielle Lewis, the head of the corporate department and all-around terrifying partner, would take you out for lunch and scare you straight. If lunch with Danielle Lewis didn’t do the trick, word on the street was that the next time Ms. Lewis visited your office, she would be accompanied by a Gilson Hecht security guard and your last paycheck.
And this is the year Jack is up for partner. Must try not to get Jack fired in the year he is up for partner.
Stop staring at Jack’s legs.
Must remember that Jack is totally on the rebound. Thus, even if you started dating Jack and got yourself fired from the firm, it would still never last. It never lasts when you’re the rebound girl.
Although rebound sex is hot. Yum. Stop thinking about sex! Must remember that even if you had totally hot rebound sex and ended up dating Jack and getting fired, you would find yourself three and a half years later without a wedding date set. You’d have your heart broken again, but with the added bonus of also collecting unemployment.
As I puzzled over how much one could reasonably expect to make on unemployment, I watched Jack pull the kilt down over and over in a vain attempt to make it longer. Try as he might, and my goodness, he was trying, the kilt did not get any longer.
Stop staring at Jack’s legs!
Remember you are trying to get back together with Douglas. This task will be infinitely more difficult if you start dating Jack. Especially since Douglas knows all about your history with Jack.
“It’s crap,” Jack said, touching the kilt’s fabric as he looked at himself in the mirror.
“But it looks great,” I said, smoothing it out.
“Why are we doing this again?” he asked me for the fortieth time in forty-eight hours.
“You are doing this because it will be the role of your lifetime and any good actor worth his salt knows how to do accents. I’m doing it because I’m trying to keep my dignity ever-so-slightly intact.”
“And are you doing that?” he asked.
“Anyway,” I said, ever so deftly changing the conversation, “it’ll be like a big real-life acting workshop for you, with art totally imitating life, to boot.”
“Did you answer my question?”
“I also think that you really need to spend some quality time with Marcus. I mean, Vanessa is one of your best friends and you barely know her husband.”
“Vanessa barely gets to spend any quality time with Marcus. It’s a miracle that she even knows him.”
“Are you two finding everything all right?” the man with the mohawk asked us.
“Everything’s fine,” Jack assured him.
“You two really make a delightful couple,” he said. Even with the fluorescent mohawk, he still looked like every other old man I’ve met. He was beginning to remind me of Mr. Rosenblatt, my grandmother’s “friend.” Though I was twenty-five years old at the time, my mother was afraid to tell me that my grandmother had found someone new after my grandfather died, so she called old Irving Rosenblatt my grandmother’s “friend.” Or maybe it was just because she just didn’t want me to feel bad that my grandmother had found a single man faster than I had.
“When are you popping the question?” Mr. Mohawk whispered to Jack a little too loudly.
“Just as soon as I think she’ll say yes,” Jack said, eyes on me. He wasn’t smiling, but I’m sure he was joking. He had just broken off an engagement six months ago, and since then, he’s always had a million girls hanging around him. He’s even more of a cad than Douglas! Well, maybe that’s unfair — Jack had never been living with one woman and engaged to another at the same time. As far as I know.
I don’t know why I ever even told Douglas the story about what happened between Jack and me; it only served to fuel the superiority complex Douglas had over Jack — he had succeeded in winning me over where Jack had failed — but I think that at the time, I was trying to best Douglas’s “wildest place you ever had sex” story. Douglas’s was in the bathroom at a wedding at the Rainbow Room with a bridesmaid he had just met. I now realize that for him, a black-tie affair means easy access.
Since Jack and I never slept together, my story was a bit anticlimactic, but it was a lame attempt to show Douglas that I, too, had had my share of wild spontaneous moments.
Jack and I were on our way back from depositions in South Carolina, racing to the airport in a rental car that smelled like cheap cologne and cigarettes. I had the windows down and was breathing in as much fresh suburban air as I could before getting onto the plane. We had just had an amazing day — Jack had gotten all of the testimony he needed from the witness and some he didn’t even expect the witness to give up. At lunch, we had called the partner in charge of the case, who was elated, telling Jack that his performance would get the firm’s membership talking about his partnership prospects.
It was after six o’clock, and we were rushing to catch the last flight of the evening out of Columbia, South Carolina. Columbia, from what I had seen in the twenty-four hours prior, was not exactly the type of place you wanted to stay any longer than you had to. When we’d checked into our hotel the night before, the receptionist said to Jack and me “I’ve never met a Jew before,” as easily as if she’d said, “I’ve never met an alien before,” or, even closer still, “I’ve never met the devil before.” When you live in New York, you don’t realize that for other parts of the country, that can be a perfectly acceptable topic of conversation.
The traffic was behaving for quite some time on the expressway and it felt like nothing could bring us down. Nothing, that is, until we hit the approach to the airport. About three miles from the airport, the traffic came to a standstill. An absolute dead halt. We tried to keep our cool for a while, him — trying to convince me that the traffic would break any second and that we would make our flight, me — playing with the radio, trying to find “happy” music that would make us forget the traffic altogether. We talked about taking shortcuts, experimenting with the service road, and that seemed to give us hope for a while. Except for the fact that we had no idea where we were and couldn’t afford to waste any time getting lost.
I finally found a classic rock station that was playing one Doors song after the other. I let it play. The people in the car next to ours yelled over to us to find out what station we were listening to. I told them and they tuned into the Doors also. They got out of their car and started dancing along to “Hello, I Love You.” I turned to look at Jack but he was unamused. He was on his cell phone trying to get through to the airline. Jack hated to work a second longer than he had to and was dead set on getting us home that night. I myself had already given up on any thoughts of getting home that night, consoling myself with the fact that I would be billing the client for all of my time. Other cars were listening to traffic radio and screaming reports out their windows (“Jackknifed tractor-trailer one mile up — sounds like we’ll be here awhile — anyone got a Snickers?”)
“L.A. Woman” came on the radio and I started to dance in my seat. All of the cars around us had emptied out and their owners were milling about the expressway, meeting other drivers and sitting on each other’s hoods. It was already dark. The cars were all in park, and some were even starting to turn their headlights off.
“I’m getting out,” I said to Jack and hopped on the hood of our rental car. It was the end of March and one of those first nights that promise the coming of spring with a little kiss of warm weather. I took a deep breath and enjoyed the fresh air.
“What are you doing?” Jack called to me from the inside of the car.
“Billing Janobuilder Corp. for my time. Only it’s more fun to do it out here, watching the stars.” I heard Jack’s car door open. I took off my suit jacket and threw it into my window as Jack joined me on the hood, taking his jacket off, too, and loosening his tie.
“It’s beautiful out here,” he said and I nodded in agreement. “But what do we do if we’re still out here when the traffic starts back up?”
“I don’t think we’re going to have to worry about that,” I said, looking at my watch. According to my count, we’d been outside waiting for twenty minutes already. A gentle drizzle started to drop and the crowd cheered as if Jim Morrison himself had descended from the heavens and brought the rain with him. I put my hands out to feel the drops while Jack tried to cover his head. Jack, seeing that his fight with the drizzle was futile, finally gave in to the night and started to show me some constellations. Somewhere between the Big Dipper and my zodiac sign, we saw our plane leave for New York City without us.
We got back to the hotel around 9:00 p.m. and the only place still serving food was the piano bar in the lobby. The singer was dripping from the piano, dressed from head to toe in red satin and black lace like a modern day Mae West, with the cleavage to really back it up. From the looks of things, it seemed as if she and her piano player had a thing going on. Jack and I sat at the bar and ate burgers and drank beers and started to sing along as best we could with Mae’s showtunes. Only Jack didn’t really know any of the words, so I had to quickly tell him each line of the song — from Cats to Pippin — before it played. He kept leaning in real close, way too many beers on his breath, and I would whisper the lyric, way too loud, into his ear. The piano player moved on to West Side Story and Jack’s face lit up — announcing to anyone at the bar who would listen that he played Tony in high school. He and Mae did a daring rendition of “America” before Mae took “A Boy Like That” as a solo. Then it was Jack’s turn to shine. Mae sat down on the piano bench while the piano player cued up Jack’s big number. Jack sang “Maria” to me in perfect pitch, except on the parts where he should have said “Maria,” he instead inserted “Brooke Miller.”
“Brooke Miller, I just met a girl named Brooke Miller. And suddenly that name will never be the same to me!”
He came over to the bar and grabbed me to dance. He held me close to his chest, my hand in his.
“Brooke Miller, I’ve just kissed a girl named Brooke Miller, and suddenly I found how wonderful a sound can be.” He twirled me around and then sat me back on my bar stool.
“Brooke Miller, say it loud and there’s music playing,” he sang to me, “say it soft and it’s almost like praying. Brooke Miller,” he sang, leaning in tight for his big finish, “I’ll never stop saying Brooke Miller, Brooke Miller, Brooke Miller. The most beautiful sound I ever heard, Brooke Miller!”
Is it any wonder that we ended up kissing by the time the bar closed? Truth be told, I’d s
ecretly wanted to do that all day. There was something very sexy about Jack doing his job all day. Doing his job so well all day. Who knew he was so smart?
The following Monday morning, Jack came into my office looking dead serious.
“Are you quitting or am I?” he asked me. I laughed and he didn’t laugh back.
“No one’s quitting anything,” I said. “Don’t be ridiculous!”
“I’m talking about…” he said, brushing the shaggy hair from his baby blues.
“The kiss,” I said, cutting him off. “I know.”
“Shhh!” he said, jumping up and slamming my office door shut. “Someone will hear you!” I couldn’t help but laugh at how cute he was when he was trying to be serious. I had the sudden impulse to kiss him again.
“No one’s going to hear me,” I said, jumping on the desk and crossing my legs, trying to look seductive, like Heather Locklear in Melrose Place.
“One of us has to quit,” he said, and as he got closer to me I wrapped my legs around him. “Are you listening to me?” I pulled him to me and tried to kiss him. He pulled away.
“No one has to quit,” I said, still perched on the edge of my desk, legs now dangling over the side like a little girl whose chair is too high for her.
“You know the firm’s policy,” he said.
“I guess I don’t care about it that much.”
“Well, I do. We work on every case together. I don’t want to get fired. My father would kill me,” he said. “So, then, maybe you should quit.”
“Me, quit?” I asked. “I just got here seven months ago! I’m not going anywhere! Maybe you should quit!”
“Okay, then. I’ll quit.”
“Oh, my God! You can’t quit! Not because of me, anyway. Are you insane?”
“Well, what then?” he asked and I didn’t know what to say.
I was still puzzling over it that day at lunch. As I sat at my usual table in the Gilson Hecht cafeteria with Vanessa and seven of our closest friends from the first-year associate class, all I could think about was Jack. Vanessa and one of our other friends were engaging in a lively debate about whether or not the fat-free balsamic vinaigrette the firm stocked at the salad bar was, in fact, fat free.
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