by Erica Katz
“Hey. So, do you want to meet me at the bar in The Grill at like seven and grab a drink before we meet up with everybody else?” I squinted as I waited for his response, imagining that it was exactly how it must feel to ask somebody out on a date.
“Yeah.” He sounded relieved. “Yeah, I would. Good call, Skip.”
Dreading a sober walk with Jordan over to The Grill, I told him I needed to run a quick errand and would meet him there. When he arrived, I was already at the bar sipping a martini. I didn’t know how to greet him, but he plunked himself down on the stool next to mine and ordered a drink before even saying hello. We made small talk about his Christmas vacation until the bartender finally gave him his scotch neat.
I waited until he took his first sip. “What happened never happened as far as I’m concerned,” I began. “We never need to talk about it.”
Jordan nodded slowly and then looked up at me. “But what if . . .” He paused. “Can we talk about it?” I nodded gently. “It’s happened three times. But now it’s over.”
“That’s good. I mean, that it’s over. Not that it happened,” I stammered, and we both smiled at my nervous chatter.
“But she still calls me like . . . all the time. It’s a mess. Look, I know I never should have done it. But when it first happened, I hadn’t slept with my wife in like five months. I was losing my mind.”
I coughed as I took a sip of vodka. “Wow. I mean . . . why?”
“She wants a baby. I want to make partner first. She wouldn’t use protection. It turned into a fight every time we were about to have sex, so we just stopped having it. And stopped talking about babies. And finally, stopped talking. And then we were just—”
“Roommates,” I finished his sentence, wondering if Sam and I would still be sleeping together if my guilty conscience wasn’t driving me toward it.
“Roommates,” Jordan confirmed. “But I love her. So much. And I don’t know why I feel the need to wait to bring a kid into the world until I’m fully secure. Maybe because I grew up with no money and around people with money. And I still wake up sweating, feeling like somebody could take it away any second.” He took a long sip of his scotch, leaving only a thin amber layer at the base of his glass. “I’m a shitty person.”
“You’re not.” I meant it. I was certain of it. “If you want to be with your wife, continue to ignore Nancy. She’ll leave you alone eventually. Tell your wife you want to make it work. She doesn’t want a divorce. She wants a baby. And it sounds like you do, too. You can figure it out. Okay?”
He nodded.
“Everybody will be here soon. Are you good? Should we blow everybody off?”
“I’m good. I just want to get really drunk right now.”
“I’m in!” I signaled to the bartender for the bill, then grabbed it before Jordan had a chance. “My treat.”
Jordan watched me sign my name, then took the pen from me and added three letters after my signature.
“Expense this. You’re in the club now,” he said with a smile.
I rolled my eyes. “You don’t need to write ‘esquire’ to expense something. Accounting knows we’re all lawyers.”
“No. But if you write ‘est,’ they’ll know that you work for Matt, and you will never, ever get questioned about an expense, no matter how big, and you’ll get the money in your checking account within forty-eight hours. That’s a t, by the way, not a q.” He pointed at the last letter. “Seriously, I mean, don’t test the boundaries, but I once took five clients to Vegas for a night to watch a fight. It cost about six grand a person, all in. The money was back in my account before we landed the next morning.”
“What does ‘est’ stand for?”
“The partner Matt used to work for invented it like forty years ago. Just means we work the hardest and longest and we should be entitled to the best when we go out. It’s corny, but it’s tradition.”
Even beyond the Miami invitation, and the steady staffing on their deals, this was the moment when I felt completely accepted into their group. Already a little buzzed, I threw my arms around Jordan’s neck, completely unconcerned with the propriety of the gesture.
He patted me on the back. “Easy, Skip. Let’s go get me drunk.”
“Drunkest,” I said with a wink.
The morning light filtered into the bedroom, even though I’d asked Sam to install blackout shades months ago, rousing me painfully from sleep. I winced before I even opened my eyes and then popped them open.
Sam stirred slightly next to me, but I lay perfectly still, my eyes glued to the ceiling, for a few moments before starting my day, a trick I had learned to help combat a hangover.
“What’s going on in there?” Sam asked as I felt him watching me.
“Just thinking,” I said.
“About what?”
My hangover. My colleague’s adulterous relationship. How I’m pathetically obsessed with a man I cheated on you with, who clearly has forgotten I’m alive. “That my head hurts,” I said, and laughed.
“Well, maybe you should drink less.” He turned away from me and pulled up the covers. He’d seemed annoyed after our time together over Christmas had come to an end, but it wasn’t realistic that I could continue working from home, cooking dinner every night, and sleeping with him more than usual to try to deflect my guilt.
“It has nothing to do with how much I drink,” I snapped. “It has to do with the fact that I don’t sleep because the ONE thing I have asked you to do around our apartment has not been done!”
He turned back to me. “What are you talking about?”
“I asked you to install blackout shades months ago!” How could he not find the time to do that? What did he even do all day?
“You mentioned once, at brunch, that we should research brands of blackout shades. That was you asking me to order them and hire somebody to install them?” Sam sat up in bed. “Maybe if you stopped waking up so hungover, you could sleep through the slightest bit of sunlight creeping through.”
He threw off the covers, slid out of bed, and stalked into the bathroom.
“I don’t have a headache because I’m hungover!” As I stared up at the ceiling, though, I knew he was right. I shut my eyes, trying to escape the feeling that I was spinning out of control.
Part V
Breakup
The termination of a deal without closing; typically, a fee is paid by the party failing to follow through with agreed-upon closing terms.
Q.You stated earlier that the nonsexual relationships you described with colleagues evolved from your initial friendly encounters. How, when, and why did these relationships change?
A.Should I focus on my relationship with Gary Kaplan?
Q.No, we’d like to hear a fuller account of the weeks before you matched with a practice group.
Chapter 18
I sat cross-legged on the plush beige textured carpet in my room at the Beverly Hills Hotel, refolding the clothes from my suitcase and putting them in drawers. Carmen lay belly-down on my bed, her elbows pressing into the luxurious mattress as she typed on her phone. Her nails were painted a vibrant pink, and her hair was glossy and full.
“You are looking extra good these days at work, miss,” I told her. She stopped typing and looked over at me, her head cocked to the side, looking slightly confused. “Thank you.”
I took a beat before continuing.
“Are you like . . . seeing somebody at work? Just wondering what’s inspiring you to look so hot lately.”
She blinked twice, gave me a small smile, and looked away. “Nope,” she said, then looked down at her screen and then back at me. “Leave me alone!” she said, laughing, before averting her eyes yet again.
“Shaaaaady,” I sang.
Carmen moved her phone closer to her face. “Derrick missed his flight. He only landed an hour ago.” I glanced at the agenda to see that we had three hours before our welcome meeting. He wouldn’t miss anything. “He’s really out of control these d
ays.”
“Really? How do you know?”
She ignored me. Derrick had been looking increasingly worn since starting work, though it was no surprise, given that he’d assumed the role of client entertainer and seemed to be out with clients at least four nights a week. Jordan had told me a rumor that he was on track to have the largest client development spend at the firm that year, which was absolutely unheard of and totally inappropriate at our level.
“How do you know about Derrick?” I pressed.
“Information just comes to me,” she said. “Like with Derrick’s ex in Bergdorf’s. Like, what are the chances that we met that guy?”
“You didn’t tell anybody about that, right? About Derrick being gay?” I prodded, hoping that word of the private life he kept very close to the vest hadn’t slipped out and somehow caused him to unravel.
“No way. Information is power, but only if not everybody has it,” she said dismissively, eyes still on her phone. I stared at the creature before me, alarmed by her Machiavellian comment, but opted to appreciate her rare display of transparency rather than analyze what it said about her. She finally looked up. “Kevin was just on his way to the pool and saw Derrick checking in. He was upgrading to the presidential suite.”
I knew this was completely out of line for him to do, but I couldn’t help but be curious. “I want to see the suite! Should I text Derrick to see if we can stop by?”
“Kevin just said they’re all at the pool. Let’s go!”
“You go,” I insisted, turning to my closet. “I didn’t bring a suit.”
Vivienne’s words echoed in my head: Don’t wear a bikini.
“You can borrow one of mine,” Carmen offered.
“Nah, thanks though. But I’ll get a drink and put my feet in.”
As we approached the crowded pool, it was obvious who the Klasko first-years were. It was almost comforting to see that first-years from all the offices around the world looked similarly stressed-out and sleep-deprived, in stark contrast to the tanned and beautiful tourists in the pool. Kevin introduced us to three male associates from LA, who stood in the pool with their elbows resting on the ledge, typing furiously into their phones, two women from Hamburg, and another from our Tokyo office. Ten or so others smiled at us with no introduction.
I took a seat on a lounge chair while Carmen pulled off her gauzy cover-up. Everybody stared at her. The LA boys stopped typing. Her breasts spilled out to the sides of her tiny black bikini top before she submerged them underwater, at which point the guys turned back to their phones.
Derrick made his way over to me. “You’re begging to get tossed in,” he said, eyeing my shorts and T-shirt.
“You wouldn’t dare.” I narrowed my eyes at him. Though he was smiling, there was something different about him, a darkness in his mood. I held my hand up to the glare of the sun to see him more clearly, but he turned to a waitress, ordered another drink, and dove into the water.
“This firm was founded in 1918 on the principles that unparalleled excellence and creative thought are paramount in the practice of law . . .” At our introductory meeting in the late afternoon, a young black female partner who was head of Klasko’s Diversity Initiative spoke passionately while a photograph of the two dead white male founders was projected onto the screen behind her. I looked around the dark hotel ballroom, which was filled with roughly four hundred first-year associates trying to stay awake. One of the double doors in the back of the room opened. Derrick sauntered in and took the only free seat, which happened to be at my table. He didn’t acknowledge me, his eyes never leaving the screen.
“Twenty-seven percent of our associates are diverse.” I looked back at the projection and attempted to imagine the feeling of being in the numerator of the screen boasting our diversity ratio.
The next slide popped up, featuring a map of the world. The green areas were financial centers, both established and potential, and we had office locations in each of them.
“We here at Klasko & Fitch believe very strongly that in order to be a truly global firm, seamlessly servicing our clients across jurisdictions, we must know one another. I’m proud to report that all three hundred and eighty-nine of our first-year associates from our thirty-seven offices across the globe are here today. You are what we are investing in. You are our future. Please take time to get to know . . .”
I looked at the tall blond man next to me. His name tag indicated that he was Cedric Schmidt from our Hamburg office, and that he was one of eight siblings. I looked down at my own: “Alexandra Vogel, New York Office, Holder of the Girls’ World Junior Record in both the 50 Freestyle and 400 Freestyle from 2009 to 2019.” I blushed, thinking how boastful the “fun fact” I’d given to HR a few weeks ago must seem to Cedric from Hamburg.
“Cool!” he whispered in a strong German accent as he leaned into me.
When the screen went blank, the presenter wrapped up. “Please enjoy your free time for the next two hours. Dinner will be at seven thirty right back in this room. Jeans are more than acceptable. At nine thirty, buses will leave for bumper cars if you’d like to go. And remember, try not to work too much.” Everybody laughed politely. On cue, the six waiters standing in the back of the ballroom swung the doors open in unison to reveal a full bar waiting for us just outside, and we all erupted into applause.
I grabbed two beers and headed toward my room to wait for Jordan to call me to discuss edits to the merger agreement draft I had sent him. As soon as I slipped away from the crowd at the bar and into the lobby, I spotted a blond woman in an armchair, strikingly beautiful though heavily made up. Hooker or socialite? She sat with her legs crossed, her legs so long that her knees nearly reached to her chest. Socialite. Her strappy heels looked worn. Her hair changed texture just below her neckline. Hooker. The handle of her Chanel bag was carefully hung from her chair arm. Socialite. If it’s real.
As I waited at the elevator bank, I tried not to stare.
“Alex!”
Vivienne White had exited an elevator and paused in front of me, radiating a warmth I had never gotten from her in New York. The tan, silver-haired man with her stopped as well.
“Hi! I didn’t realize you’d be here. So good to see you,” I said as I extended my hand.
“I’m doing your ethics presentation tomorrow with George here. George, this is my all-too-neglected associate mentee, Alex Vogel. She’s quickly becoming a rock star of the M&A group without any help from me, though, so don’t feel too bad for her. Alex, George Jacobson.”
Managing partner of our Washington, DC, office. Big deal.
George Jacobson shook my hand firmly, and I tried to maintain eye contact, but I was distracted again by the long-legged woman in the lobby. Was that Derrick talking to her now? Can’t be . . .
“Pleasure.” I looked again at George and then back over his shoulder.
That was Derrick. He was taking out his wallet. What was he . . .
“I’m horrible. No more canceling from me, Alex,” Vivienne said, a little too sweetly. “I’ll see you tomorrow, but we need to have a proper lunch when I get back.”
I nodded and tried to focus, but I couldn’t keep my eyes off Derrick. Vivienne turned to see where I was looking.
“Oh my gosh. Is that a prostitute?” she asked, giggling as she covered her mouth.
“For sure,” George confirmed. “And in broad daylight.”
My heart beat more quickly. “No, I don’t think so,” I said, shaking my head vigorously.
“Isn’t that one of our associates with her?” Vivienne asked, suddenly serious.
“I’m not . . . I don’t know,” I stammered.
“That’s a Klasko name tag on him!” George said.
I was saved by the ding of another elevator arriving. “Looking forward to the presentation!” I yelled after them as the doors closed me in.
I sat in my hotel room and stared at my blank computer screen. Had I just gotten Derrick into trouble? Would they even say anythin
g to him? I bet they wouldn’t. It didn’t even make any sense that he’d be with a female prostitute. Wasn’t he gay?
The trill of my hotel room phone sent me flying out of my seat in terror. “Hello?”
“Hey, Skip. How is it?” I could hear Jordan flipping through papers on his desk. “Do you have my markup in front of you?” Shit shit shit. If I hadn’t been staring, they would have never noticed Derrick. I scrolled past an email from Carmen telling me to call her and one from Kevin about where they’d be drinking after dinner, and opened the email with Jordan’s markup. “Got it.”
Turning changes took longer than I had expected, and by ten I noted with relief that I had missed an awkward associates’ dinner. I ordered room service.
At midnight I finally got around to calling Carmen, who answered after one ring and with no preamble. “Where have you BEEN? Derrick got caught with hookers and coke!”
“What? What happened?!”
“I mean, he had hookers and coke in his hotel room! George Jacobson from the DC office knocked on his door and apparently saw everything.”
“They were in his room? Multiple? Female? How do you know? Is he in jail?”
“No, he’s not in jail! He’s a Klasko associate. Could you even imagine the field day the press would have if he went to jail?”
“Seriously, how do you know all this?”
“One of the girls from the Houston office got upgraded to the suite floor, in the room next to his. She stuck her head out of her door and heard the whole thing go down. And yes. Female hookers. That’s the weirdest part.”
“Jesus!” I closed my eyes. “What do you think is going to happen?”
“I have no fucking idea! But seriously, you miss all the good scandals by working too much, Alex.”
I closed my eyes, guilt draining the energy from my body. I knew something was going on with him.
“Questions?” Vivienne asked at the end of the last slide of her ethics presentation. Hands shot up. I’d searched the crowd for Derrick when I arrived, but hadn’t seen him then, and I didn’t see any sign of him now. I hadn’t yet heard any word as to his fate, and I didn’t want to reach out and embarrass him. I looked at my phone, refreshed my in-box again, and immediately spotted an email from Peter.
