Jack With a Twist bm-2

by Brenda Janowitz

  After I finish drafting my responses, I should draft my own set of Interrogatories to serve on Jack. That’ll show him. As it is, I’ll be in the office all night working on how to answer his set of Interrogatories. Drafting a quick set of my own wouldn’t keep me here much longer. Once you’re totally sleep-deprived, does an extra hour lost really matter that much, anyway?

  Jack taught me how to draft Interrogatories; I should be able to do them in my sleep. First, you have to figure out what information you need in order to prove your case. Well, that one’s easy for me—I need to know why Monique’s husband is being such a jerk. I need to figure out why, in the face of a simple business matter, he has turned this into a contentious litigation. And more importantly, why has this attitude rubbed off on my fiancé and turned him into such a jerk?

  These questions may not be appropriate for the Interrogatories. Perhaps I should just focus on answering the Interrogatories that Jack has asked me.

  Interrogatory 1: State the grounds for dissolving this business partnership.

  Haven’t I told Jack that before? That sort of thing would have been in my Initial Complaint. As I click through my documents on my computer, though, I can’t seem to find the original document. The file names all blur together and I feel my eyes beginning to close against my will.

  I’m more tired than I realized. If I could just put my head down for one tiny little minute, I bet I’d feel much better. A cat nap. That’s what I need. I just need one of those twenty-minute naps that totally revitalize and rejuvenate you. Then, I can get back to my work.

  Leaning back in my ergonomically correct chair, I slowly close my eyes and take a deep breath in, deep breath out. Yes, a little sleep. This is just what I need.

  I get back to my apartment and the clock on the microwave oven blinks 2:45 a.m. Too tired to hang my coat and work bag up in the closet, I take them off and just let them fall where they will in the foyer. As I walk into the apartment, I realize that an enormous red silk screen is smack dab in the middle of my living room. I know I haven’t been home much lately, but it’s just so unlike Jack to just start redecorating the place without me. And, anyway, it’s blocking my path into the bedroom.

  I walk over to the screen and try to move it, but it’s stuck in place. Turning around backward and putting all of my weight into it, I lean against the screen and try to push. I give it a few good heaves and hos, but it’s no use. The thing simply won’t budge.

  I call out for Jack to help me. The silk that covers the screen is extremely fine and I know that he should be able to hear me through its smooth fibers. But, he doesn’t hear me. Instead, I hear him. I hear voices, low and dim, giggling together, laughing together and then I don’t hear anything at all.

  “Jack,” I cry out, “are you there?”

  No response. More giggling from the bedroom. I turn around again and put my full weight onto the silk screen. I push and I push and the screen doesn’t move at all. It doesn’t move an inch.

  “Jack,” I say, trying to sound composed, “what is going on over there? Help me, I’m stuck!”

  But he doesn’t come. Instead, I hear more rustling from the bedroom and then a voice.

  “Oh, Jack,” I hear and I can barely make out whose voice it is. I march back into the kitchen and open the drawer. Rifling around, I finally find what I need—I grab the scissors and quickly make my way back to the gigantic silk screen. I consider, for a brief second, cutting the screen slowly and carefully, only making a hole big enough for me to walk through, but then reconsider in an instant and just stab the fabric quickly. It takes a few stabs before it rips, but when it does, the entire thing opens up for me. It opens wide, like the petals of a rose awakening in the spring, and I walk through the hole toward the bedroom.

  As I make my way down the hallway, I hear the voices again. I try to move quickly, but my feet feel like they are lead. The faster I try to move, the slower I seem to walk. Everything around me gets blurry and dark, and I struggle to bring things back into focus. The hallway stretches out before me, seemingly getting longer with each and every step that I take.

  “Jack,” I hear the voice say again, and I rack my brain to figure out who it is. I finally get closer to the bedroom door and I reach out to grab the doorknob. In an instant, I realize whose voice it is that I’ve been hearing: Miranda Foxley’s.

  “Jack!” I call out, reaching for the doorknob, but the more I try to reach for it, the further away it seems to get from my grasp.

  “Jack!” I cry, “Jack!” Everything becomes so dark and blurry, I can’t even see the doorknob anymore. I float backward, further and further away from my apartment, and suddenly, I feel my head jerk upwards.

  I wake up with a start and realize that I was just sleeping. It was only a dream. More like a nightmare, actually, but the important thing is that it wasn’t actually happening to me. I was only sleeping.

  As I stretch out the crink in my neck from sleeping in my chair, I realize that I’ve slept for forty-five minutes and I need to get back to answering Jack’s Interrogatories immediately if I have any chance at all of getting home before the sun rises and tonight actually becomes tomorrow. And it’s so late that I can forget any chance I had of drafting my own set of Interrogatories.

  But then, I look at my computer screen. Seems that I’ve already started drafting my Interrogatories. Funny, because I don’t recall writing anything at all.

  But, my computer screen tells an entirely different story:

  IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK—————————————————————

  In the matter of:

  The dissolution of partnership of Index No. 54930285-NY

  Monique Couture, Inc.—————————————————————

  STATE OF NEW YORK

  COUNTY OF NEW YORK

  INTERROGATORIES

  1. State the grounds for your inability to stand up to your father.

  2. State the grounds, if different than your response to Interrogatory No. 1, for your inability to stand up to your family as a whole.

  3. Explain the nature of your relationship to Miranda Foxley.

  4. List each of the reasons you love Brooke Miller.

  5. You still love Brooke Miller, don’t you?

  20

  “This sort of thing really doesn’t come under the umbrella of what a bride should do for her wedding videographer,” I say through the double-thick, bullet-proof glass.

  “I didn’t want to call my regular guy,” Jay says, from the other side of the glass, “and the way I see it, you owe me a solid.”

  Great. Now I owe one to a mobster. According to Wikipedia, “soldiers” are low-level players in the mafia family. To get to be a soldier, you have to “prove” yourself as an associate to the family first. [Insert dramatic music as you ponder the question: “What exactly does one do to prove oneself to a mafia family?”] I really wish I wasn’t an obsessive lawyer who just had to look that one up.

  “But, you’re not a paparazzo,” I say, holding the phone about an inch away from my ear, for fear of catching something here at the Manhattan Detention Center.

  Jay shrugs.

  “So, what exactly were you doing rifling through Monique deVouvray and Jean Luc Renault’s garbage?” I ask. I’m calm and cool and collected when I ask him this—I say a silent thank you to the gods above that I’d told Monique to start shredding all of her documents on the off chance that paparazzi would start going through her trash. Otherwise, this situation would have been stressful in many, many ways. More so than the obvious, I mean.

  “It’s public property,” he says into the telephone.

  “Actually,” I say, “it’s not. That’s why you got arrested. Monique and Jean Luc own the property their townhouse is situated on, which includes the alley you were skulking around. That’s why they had you arrested for trespassing.”

  “I wasn’t skulking,” Jay says. “
Anyway, all they really had in their garbage was chantilly lace and thick silk.”

  “Ooh,” I say, “you should keep that. It’s really expensive.”

  “So, can you get me out of here?” he asks, looking around.

  “First, I have a few questions I’d like to ask you,” I say. I fail to mention here that I can absolutely get him out of here. Right this minute, I might add. When I got to the Manhattan Detention Center, I met the prosecutor who’s holding him—an old friend of mine from law school who said she’d take care of this for me. Which is good, since I really just want to get Jay out and go—taking him on as an actual client would be a conflict of interest with my other, more important, more law-abiding client, Monique. So, I thank my lucky stars that the prosecutor is someone I know.

  Do I have to invite another old law school friend to my wedding now? Under Jack’s strict orders, I’ve been trying very hard not to befriend anyone new, since I’d like to keep my wedding to a modest count of just under six hundred people.

  “Whaddya wanna know?” Jay asks, looking around the visitor’s center.

  “Well, it’s just that,” I start out. All of my stammering must have caught Jay’s attention—or annoyed him at the very least—because he turns to me and fixes his eyes on mine. I realize that it’s the first time that we’ve actually made eye contact and I don’t really like it. I divert my eyes downward.

  “Did you get anything on Miranda Foxley?” I blurt out.

  “She is one fun girl,” he says, leaning back in his chair. The phone cord barely extends as he flips his head back with a smile.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask, trying not to look judgmental. Or jealous.

  “She likes to indulge in a little activity known as the afternoon delight,” Jay says, rubbing his hands together.

  Afternoon delight? What’s afternoon delight? Is that some sort of drug I haven’t heard of yet? Is that what all the kids are doing these days? Just when I figure out the difference between E and Special K, now there’s some other drug I need to worry about my future children getting peer-pressured into taking?!?

  “She does drugs?” I say, sotto voce, leaning in to the double-thick glass. I’m hoping that by whispering, the guards who monitor the conversations in this room won’t notice that we are blatantly talking about drugs.

  “Haven’t seen her do drugs yet,” he says, “but you never know what’s going on during those afternoon delights.”

  “What?” I ask, “I don’t get it.”

  Jay laughs and leans back toward me. “Sky rockets in flight…” he sings.

  “Most people don’t really feel like a sing-a-long when they’re being held as a guest of the state at the Manhattan Detention Center,” I say, looking around to the other lawyers all gathered on my side of the glass. No other lawyer seems to be getting a serenade like I am.

  “Gonna find my baby,” he sings, low and sultry into the phone, leaning closer into the glass as he does so, “gonna hold her tight…”

  This is getting to be inappropriate. Surely in just a minute, he’ll make a play for the glass and try to escape with me. I’ll have to call the guards who will then call my emergency contact who is my fiancé, Jack. How am I going to explain how I got here? Well, let’s see: I’m planning our perfect wedding, honey, but along the way, I decided to have the wedding videographer spy on you for me, so I had to hire a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of my father’s, who just so happens to be a made man, who thinks I owe him a solid, who is now in jail, who is now inexplicably serenading me. Which really happens to brides-to-be more often than you’d think.

  As Jay gets to the part in his song about rubbing sticks and stones together, my cell phone begins to vibrate. I’ve got it set to vibrate since you’re not allowed to bring cell phones into a detention center and I used Jack’s little inside pocket trick to sneak it in. I excuse myself to run to the ladies’ room for a minute, and answer the phone.

  “Where are you?” my mother says. “You sound like you’re in a mental institution or something. Why is there an echo?”

  “Long story,” I whisper into the phone. “My wedding videographer got arrested and I’m bailing him out.”

  “You have time to bail your wedding videographer out of jail, but you don’t have time to come wedding dress shopping with me?” she asks.

  I have no response to this.

  A few minutes later, I come back to the glass partition and Jay is busy laughing and joking with his fellow inmates.

  “I’m back,” I say, “sorry about that.”

  “No problem,” he says, “we were all just talking about how much we could use an afternoon delight right now.”

  “Do you really think you and your fellow inmates should be talking about drugs while you’re in the slammer?” I whisper into the phone.

  “This ain’t the slammer, lady,” Jay says, “this is a detention center.”

  “Whatever,” I say, “the point is—”

  “An afternoon delight is sex in the middle of the afternoon,” Jay says. “It has nothing to do with drugs. Unless, of course, you’re into that sort of thing.”

  “Which I’m not,” I quickly say, looking around to the guards, so that if any of them have overheard the conversation, they’ll be able to see how innocent and law-abiding I look.

  “Perhaps your friend Miranda is,” he says, leaning into the glass. “Every afternoon at around three, a town car is waiting for her outside of the Gilson, Hecht offices. She hops in and goes up to the Upper East Side—a dingy little walk-up on 91st Street between 1st and York.”

  “To do what?” I say, riveted by Jay’s tale of the seedy underbelly of the city.

  “Play chess,” he says, as I stare back at him with my mouth hanging open. “What do you think she’s doing?”

  “I don’t know!” I say. If he thinks that I’m the sort of woman who would know what people are doing when they go to dingy little walk-ups on the Upper East Side in broad daylight, then I need to seriously reconsider my entire wardrobe. Possibly my makeup, too.

  “Lots of men who work in the city keep little apartments uptown so that they can sneak out of work during the day and meet up with their girlfriends.”

  “They do?” I ask and Jay shakes his head knowingly. “Married men?”

  “Grow up, Brooke,” Jay mutters back into the phone. “Just grow up.”

  “Who was she meeting?” I ask.

  “I didn’t get the chance to find out yet,” he says.

  “Thank God my father always worked on Long Island,” I say under my breath.

  “Your father’s the best,” Jay says, breaking into a smile. “I love that man’s chops.”

  “I’m partial to the sirloin,” I say, “but his chops are quite good.” Jay nods his head in agreement.

  How confused are the guards who are monitoring our conversation right now?

  “By the way,” Jay says, “I never asked you. Where’s your honeymoon?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I say, “but we’re thinking Hawaii. Why?”

  “If you make it Mexico,” he says, looking around at the other inmates to make sure no one is listening, “I could make it worth your while.”

  “Um, what?” I say. And then, so as not to appear rude, I add: “No, thank you.”

  “Won’t you want some honeymoon video footage?” he asks, gesturing with his hands. “I’ve got some errands to run down there and I could do both at once.”

  How dare this man invoke my honeymoon! Doesn’t he know that the honeymoon is the most sacred part of the entire wedding? Screw the ceremony—the honeymoon is where couples have their true religious experience! And he wants to besmirch it with his mob errands? This I cannot abide.

  “I have a right mind to leave you in here for a while to stew in your own juices,” I say, pursing my lips, “and think about what you’ve done wrong.”

  “Okay, okay,” he says, “honeymoon’s off the table. But are you actually tryi
ng to threaten me?” He’s leaning in and looking me dead in the eye as he says the word threaten.

  Oh, God. Oh, God, Oh, God, Oh, God. I am going to sleep with the fishes. I am going to wake up with a sawed-off horse head in my bed.

  Do not piss off the mobster. Do. Not. Piss. Off. The. Mobster.

  “No,” I say, using the same soothing voice I’d use with colicky babies or rabid animals. “Why on earth would I ever do that?”

  “Look, do you want me to shoot you or not?”

  “Please don’t shoot me,” I quickly say, eyes darting around for the prison guards. I know that this is only a detention center, but where are those guards when you need them? This is just like one of those mob films where the regular everyday person is just going about his or her day, ends up in a mix-up involving the mob, and then they come after her and her entire family. I’m too young to die!

  “Shoot your wedding video,” he says.

  “I knew that,” I quickly say.

  “Then get me out of here now.” He points his finger on the table for emphasis.

  “Guard!” I say, “Mr. Conte is ready to go.”

  Column Five

  Just asking…

  WHAT former model is so serious about her garbage that she will throw anyone who comes within ten feet of it into the Manhattan Detention Center? This is one celebrity you do not want to piss off—even though her customers think that she is as delicate as a piece of lace, this former “it” girl doesn’t think twice about throwing a paparazzo who gets too close to her or her couture right into jail. Even a pap with known connections to the mob.

  Column Five would never assume, but just what was in her garbage that got her tulle into such a bunch?

  21

  Many a bachelorette party has been thrown at Mangia e Bevi. (And I should know, since I’ve been to quite a few of them.) It’s a tiny Italian restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen where, on any given night, you can find a gaggle of girls celebrating someone’s impending nuptials by dancing on chairs (which, at Mangia e Bevi, is strongly encouraged) and drinking their drinks through penis shaped straws.