by Amanda Brown
“It’s a nice night to sit outside,” she attempted, extending a shaky hand to her water glass.
Christopher smiled broadly. “I wish I’d had time to change out of my suit,” he said. “I envy your comfort.”
Elle laughed. “I’m not the least bit comfortable,” she admitted. She hadn’t even grabbed a snack before Christopher arrived, and now, on top of everything, she was starving. Elle had wanted to be prepared to discuss Brooke’s case, so she had researched in the obsolete manner of the computer illiterate: she talked to people who knew, or knew of, Brooke Vandermark. She had spent hours on the phone with sorority sisters, gathering gossip about Brooke’s USC days, making notes like a tabloid reporter of reliable, if secondhand, details. As Elle should have expected, the best rumors came from Margot, the human Internet. She had even tracked down Dookie Dean, who was president of Theta when Brooke lived in the sorority house, which was some trouble, since the recent divorcée was still living under her married name. Elle found out in the first breath that Dookie Dean didn’t go by the nickname “Doo-Dee” anymore, an offending gaffe that thwarted Elle’s friendly attempts to gain information.
Elle ordered a diet Coke and Christopher ordered a single-malt scotch. Elle was familiar enough with the menu to ignore the gesticulating waiter who made up for the lack of variety in the day’s specials by painstakingly describing the manner in which each was prepared. Elle suspected he was a chef at heart, stuck in a second-string job. She ordered grilled mahimahi, with instructions that the fillet be accompanied by two lemon wedges and not be touched by one drop of butter. “I mean it, if I see any butter, I’ll send it back,” she cautioned, requesting her salad dressing on the side.
“The Trappist monk will endure her fast alone,” Christopher said, and smiled. “I’d like the giant T-bone steak,” he announced, “and I want enough butter on the baked potato to drown a mule.”
Elle laughed. “I don’t know how you manage to eat like that,” she said.
“I’m from the Midwest,” he answered with a shrug. “We’ve advanced beyond gathering nuts and berries. No ice in the scotch,” he called after the departing waiter.
“Glenn Fiddich,” Elle smiled, relaxing, “is what we call my Torts professor.”
“Don’t tell me old man Glenn is still teaching!” Christopher shook his head incredulously. “He must be a hundred years old. I thought his liver would go before the end of my first year! Still knocking them back in the afternoons, is he?”
Elle paused, wrinkling her brow. It was odd to imagine the stylish Christopher Miles at Stanford. Maybe law school was different then.
“I can’t imagine you at Stanford.”
Christopher smiled. “The feeling is mutual, Miss Woods.”
“What, you can’t imagine yourself there either? I guess it’s been a while.”
“Easy, young one,” the lawyer cautioned. “It wasn’t so long ago. I meant I can’t imagine you there. Stanford must be very proud to count you in its ranks.”
“Well, I doubt that it’s changed very much.” Elle caught herself on the verge of trotting out her grievances with law school, the bulk of which were aesthetic. “People just study mainly, and worry.” She shrugged. “Stanford Law is not a proud place.”
“You’re right, then. It hasn’t changed.” Christopher winked. “There’s no pride in practicing law either.”
Elle shook her head vigorously. “I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that or I wouldn’t be here. I think you should be very proud of what you’re doing for Brooke. She needs someone to believe in her, and you’re standing up for her. I want to help her too. That’s why I want to work on her case.”
“Quite noble, Miss Woods. A lawyer who wants to be of help.” He cocked his head slyly, but his skeptical words were at odds with his soft eyes, looking back on a musty old feeling. He had wanted to be of help too, when he started. Students encouraged him when he felt they had not lost faith.
“Tell me, Elle,” he asked mischievously, “would you take this job if I told you I would not, in any event, act as a reference? Not call around to help you get a clerkship? Not even confirm that you worked for me? Just let you…help?”
“Absolutely,” Elle said. “If we get Brooke out of trouble, I’ll just have people call her instead.”
“And if we don’t,” Christopher sighed, “they’ll have to call the warden.”
Elle scowled. “That’s a bad attitude.”
“Realistic,” the lawyer said with a shrug, nodding thanks to the waiter for his scotch. “The way it looks now, this case is the toughest of my career. Like I said, the criminal defense will be easier than the will contest. Brooke has no alibi, and if it comes down to credibility…” Christopher trailed off, not wanting to predict his own defeat.
“Brooke didn’t do it,” Elle declared firmly. “She didn’t need the money. She believed in perfection. She worked very hard. She was nice to animals. She used to brush her dog every day and she gave him mints. She was…” Elle thought of what she had heard, and halted. It still seemed rude to mention. She blushed, taking her cocktail stirrer from the tablecloth. Christopher was in good shape. Maybe he wouldn’t understand.
“She was what, Elle?” He leaned forward, setting his drink aside, staring expectantly, his hands kneading together in the manner of prayer. “What do you know about Brooke?”
“Well, I hate to say it,” Elle said, grimacing, “but she was really fat.”
“Fat?” Christopher settled back in his chair, breathing a heavy, disappointed sigh. “Elle, I just don’t see how that makes any difference now. By the way, she’s in great shape now. She’s absolutely outraged that there wasn’t a StairMaster in the L.A. County Jail. She was sure her rights were being violated.”
Elle frowned with impatience. It was as if men never thought about the struggle women endured, daily, to stay thin. They thought about the results, all right, when they wanted the feminine trophy of their success. As if women came from cookie cutters. She would bet her life that Christopher Miles never dated a fat girl. Warner certainly hadn’t, she thought in gentle reproach. It must have been hard for Brooke.
“Don’t you see, she made something of herself,” Elle protested. “She’s worked for every pound. She’s not a woman who takes the easy way.”
“You talk about her as if you know her,” Christopher said, puzzled but still unconvinced.
Elle nodded. “I do. She was my step-aerobics instructor at USC. It was the hardest class I ever took!”
“She taught an aerobics class in jail,” Christopher said. “‘Felon-o-robics,’ she called it. I’m sure there was some disappointment when she made bail. She told the ladies to keep themselves together, to use the time they had as a project to shed those few extra pounds. She said to think of it like going away to a spa and surprising your friends with the beautiful new you on your trial date. It was a pretrial confinement, so she didn’t have to deal with any hopeless long-termers. She was very popular.”
Elle smiled warmly, more convinced than ever by Brooke’s vigorous optimism that she was on the side of truth and healthy blonde energy.
“I wasn’t sure that Brooke was the same one I knew at USC when I interviewed with you this afternoon,” Elle allowed, “but I made some calls. She was Brooke Rayburn then. She was a year ahead of me, but I remember the big controversy she caused at the Theta house.”
Christopher raised his eyes with concern. “Controversy? That’s all she needs.”
“She almost moved out. See, she was a double legacy. Her mother and her grandmother were Kappa Alpha Thetas, and her mom is still really active, a chapter president or something. So when Brooke showed up at rush, she was pretty much a given. And that didn’t make the Thetas real happy, since she was so fat. On top of being a legacy, her mom gives a lot of money, so there was no way they could blackball her.”
“That’s awful.” Christopher cringed. The viciousness of pretty women never failed to take him by surprise.
“So Brooke comes from money?” The lawyer grew interested. “Brooke told me that she put herself through school. Brooke seemed to say nothing to me that wasn’t self-defeating. It seems as if she wants to play against the highest odds.”
“Well, she did. Come from money, that is. Her dad was a real estate developer who made a fortune building strip malls, but in her sophomore year, her parents went through a divorce. Brooke found out in the worst way that her father was having an affair. One of the guys on the swim team was at a Theta crush party and he mentioned to Brooke that he’d had breakfast with her father, Mr. Rayburn, just that morning. Brooke thought he must have been interviewing for a job with her dad’s real estate company, so she asked him how the interview went. He just laughed and said it was no interview, Mr. Rayburn just liked his mother’s blueberry pancakes. It turned out that this guy’s mother lived down the street from the Rayburns in Pasadena. She was divorced, living off of a generous settlement, and spending most of her time with her horses, playing tennis at the Valley Hunt Club, and being a friendly neighbor.”
Elle took a sip of her diet Coke and looked around the restaurant.
“Anyway, she met Brooke’s dad because she got some of his mail by mistake, and she brought it over to the house. Brooke’s mom was away on business. She was a fashion photographer and was in Paris photographing the spring collections. I guess Mr. Rayburn was lonely.”
“Don’t tell me.” Christopher swatted the air with his hand.
“You guessed it,” Elle sighed. “The rat started sleeping with his neighbor. Brooke’s mother said she was a photographer because of her love of art, but she must have known something about her husband’s once lucrative so-called real estate company. It went Chapter Eleven right after the divorce.”
“So I guess Brooke told her mother about the affair?”
“It was terrible. Injustice should be Brooke’s middle name.”
The waiter arrived with an enormous tray, carrying the salads and dinner together, evidently to hurry the meal along. How mercenary, Elle thought with a scowl, resolving to eat her rice grain by grain and occupy the table all night. If she could get to it without knocking something over, she thought, surveying the cluttered table for the best angle from which to approach her salad. The waiter placed Elle’s dish in front of her with a grand, affected bow. “The lady will find not one ounce of butter to displease her,” he said.
Elle rolled her eyes. “How grand,” she answered, forcing a smile.
Christopher tapped his foot impatiently. “We would also like a bottle of Evian, please.”
The lawyer grinned and stared at Elle a bit too intensely before catching himself. “I won’t let that waiter rush us out of here,” he said.
“I’m in no rush,” she said.
She began to toss her salad in the little room that the delicate bowl allowed, forgetting in her hunger what she had been saying before.
“Well, did Brooke tell her mother?”
“Sorry,” Elle smiled. “It’s just unforgivable, what happened. Brooke told her mother as soon as she returned from Paris, and told her everything. Her mother called Brooke a liar and a wretched, dumpy little failure. She said all these awful things. She even said that Brooke was jealous of her mother’s beauty. She wouldn’t take her calls and told her to move out of the house.”
“The poor thing,” Christopher gasped. He was incredulous.
“Wait”—Elle held up her finger—“it gets worse. Her mother had to say something to explain Brooke’s being thrown out of the house, so she told her husband of the awful rumors Brooke was spreading about his misdeeds. He denied it, of course, and they cut Brooke off. He said that the little brat tried to ruin him. He threatened to sue her for slander, but she didn’t have a penny that wasn’t his, so he just went about calling her a lying wretch.”
“Did they divorce anyway?” Christopher asked.
“Oh,” Elle said, “they did, but not for a while. Basically, they divorced Brooke instead. They held up the facade of their marriage for another year and then divorced when W ran a spread of the Riviera that had the indelicacy of picturing Brooke’s mother asleep in the sand with her head on the chest of one of Lagerfeld’s financiers. She’s married him since, and she’s living in France. I don’t know where her father is. This happened in the fall of Brooke’s sophomore year.”
Christopher shook his head. He had worked in California as the natural progression of his time at Stanford, but he would never call it home. He had grown up in a small town in Iowa, where divorce was neither so common nor so ugly, and certainly not so public. His own parents, both alive, had just celebrated their golden anniversary.
“After that, she started losing weight,” Elle concluded, and turned back to her plate.
After a moment Christopher halted, a question in his eyes. “So the controversy that you mentioned at her sorority…that was this terrible divorce?”
Elle shook her head. “No, that was about the picture. See, Brooke started on this grazing diet, and she went to the gym constantly. Her own mother called her a dumpy failure! Can you imagine?”
“Grazing? Elle, I’m surprised at you. You make Brooke sound like some kind of a cow.”
“No, the grazing diet. That’s just what it’s called. It got really popular in L.A., but nobody I knew had heard of it before Brooke published it. The idea is to graze; to nibble now and then, but not really eat. I think it was six meals a day; tiny ones, like airplane-sized.”
She glanced down at her own meal and wondered if California Cafe had trained its cook at the USC Theta house.
“Brooke lived in the sorority house at the time, and she insisted that the Theta house cook use baby food to prepare all the baked goods, and nonfat yogurt for anything with a cream base. She had this whole regimen planned out. She ate barley with skim milk every morning. She had tofu-potato mash twice a day, before her afternoon and evening aerobics. For a treat, she had strained-prune-and-carob brownies.”
Christopher’s steak looked more attractive to Elle when she considered the third-world alternatives fashioned by Brooke.
“So the controversy was over the house cook?”
“No, that went over really well. All of the Thetas lost a lot of weight. The controversy was over the Model Wall.”
“I can hardly keep track of Brooke’s troubles as it is,” the lawyer said. “What’s this about a Model Wall?”
“See, a lot of Thetas have been models. Not as many as the Delta Gammas, though.”
“You were a Delta Gamma?”
Elle looked down at the table. “Right.” With all this talk about the Thetas, she didn’t feel so proud of it now. “Anyway,” she continued, “it’s sort of a tradition to have a wall with all the sorority sisters’ best modeling shots. Keeps up the house image that they have the most beautiful girls on campus.”
“You added to the Model Wall, no doubt?” Christopher said.
“Sure,” Elle said, not eager to emphasize the similarity of her sorority house to Brooke’s. She was sorry she had mentioned the Delta Gamma house at all.
“The Thetas have a pretty good wall, I’ve got to admit. Anyway, Brooke insisted on putting this picture of herself on the wall from before she lost any weight, and Doo-Dee, the Theta president, said no way. I guess Brooke kept putting pictures up, and they kept disappearing. It caused a major conflict within the sisterhood.”
“Doo-Dee?” Christopher shook his head slowly. “Are you kidding?”
“Dookie Dean, but she doesn’t go by Doo-Dee anymore,” Elle said. Christopher was grinning.
“It’s not important,” Elle said. “What matters is that Brooke finally moved out, and I think she even deactivated. She had lost enough weight by then to get a job teaching aerobics at Mega-Muscle. That’s where I met her. She taught this head-banger aerobics class, with trash-metal music. The sit-ups were twice as fast as in any other class. It was one long hour!
“She was all the rage with her aerobics class. She s
tarted sponsoring competitions, and whoever did the most sit-ups got a little half T-shirt or a free tattoo on her stomach. She published her grazing diet and it went into a second printing almost immediately. Then she went membership-only with a wellness center–restaurant she set up.”
Elle tried to signal the waiter for some lemon wedges, but he refused to make eye contact.
“Anyway, at the wellness center she planned all of the menus for the restaurant. It started to become a really trendy place to go. She expanded it to include a huge multiplex fitness center featuring her famous aerobics classes. All kinds of people worked out and ate there, from the trendy L.A. crowd to older people with health problems. That’s how she met Heyworth. He went there under doctor’s orders for her cardiac-rehab class and the food.”
Christopher laughed and moved closer to the table.
“Eventually she sold forty-nine percent of the wellness center to some investors from Texas, and it has since become a chain. I hear it’s a hot stock, and she still has the controlling interest. So she did tell you the truth. She put herself through school using student loans at first, and then with the money from the wellness center.”
“I wonder why she didn’t tell me that,” Christopher said, swirling a cut of his potato in a generous golden pool of butter.
“Please,” Elle frowned, “she’s gorgeous now. Why would she tell you she used to look like the Blueberry Girl in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory?”
“Talk to her, Elle,” Christopher said hurriedly. “She’ll tell you things she wouldn’t tell me. You’ve already made her a more likable witness, much less like someone who would marry or kill for money, since she already had her own.”
Elle raised her water glass in a toast. “I’ve got a job, I take it?”
Christopher smiled. “You’ll do well, my friend. I didn’t realize I had made you an offer.”
“Well?” Elle paused, her glass hanging uncertainly in the air.
“You’ve got a job,” he agreed, reaching for his own glass and raising to hers. “Sealed with a toast.”
