The Real Liddy James

by Anne-Marie Casey

Now it was his turn to look at her askance. They had been acquainted for over fourteen years, so why she had chosen this moment to say it she did not know; what she did know was that the statement was true. Practicing family law had not made Liddy cynical. She did not believe that most couples made those solemn vows with their fingers crossed behind their backs; she knew from experience that it was just, to misquote the old song, that love and marriage did not always go together like a horse and carriage. (In fact, in Manhattan, by conservative estimate, half the time the horse bolted through Central Park and left the carriage overturned.)

  And Liddy still felt empathy for the broken ones, the people like Gloria, blown apart by divorce with no guarantee that the pieces would ever fit back together. She hoped always that kindness and friendship would triumph amid the wreckage, in the end. But she could not deny that these days, as the economy plummeted but romantic expectations soared, negotiations were growing more and more unpleasant—as Curtis Oates was making a fortune proving.

  Sebastian smiled.

  “How very optimistic of you,” he said, and though she expected this comment to prefigure a further apology, Sebastian waved good-bye to his handkerchief and headed back to the conference room to escort Mrs. Vandervorst from the building without as much as a backward glance at Liddy.

  In the bathroom, Liddy leaned over the sink and splashed cold water on her face, avoiding the small puddles and pile of soggy tissues Mrs. Vandervorst had left behind. But it would be a good five minutes before the angry pink blotches on her cheeks faded, so she sat down on the armchair in the corner and rested her head against the toile de Jouy wallpaper. She tried to take a breath and count to five, but her mind wandered. Of course she was annoyed with herself for sobbing in front of Stackallan—although she had occasionally used vulnerability strategically, she knew tears always left professional women open to accusations of hormonal imbalance. But who could have predicted the extraordinary coincidence of his quoting Edith Wharton? The very words her ex-husband had said to her, almost seven years ago, in the terrible aftermath of what she had done; a scene she could hardly bear to remember and that she had made her mission to forget. Liddy could sometimes be a nasty woman, it was true, but up to this point in her life that fact had never made her cry.

  For a moment, she pondered the possibility of hormonal imbalance.

  Sydney came into the bathroom to deliver the news that Mr. Vandervorst had finally arrived, only to promptly leave to await papers at his office, but not before fiddling an overfamiliar arm around her waist.

  “He’s repulsive. Mrs. V’s better off without him” was Sydney’s opinion, but she did not continue for, smitten with Sebastian, there was only one man she wanted to discuss. “But Mr. Stackallan’s so cute!” she said. “And that voice. I want to close my eyes and listen to him read. Anything. Even Constitutional Law, 17th.”

  Liddy said nothing.

  “No one makes me laugh, really, but he was joking about my name. He says with so many American names, you can’t tell if it’s a girl or a guy, a bird or a bloke!” Sydney honked again.

  Liddy stood up, smoothed out her skirt, checked herself in the mirror, and attempted to affect an expression of complete indifference.

  “You know,” continued Sydney, “Mackenzie, bird or bloke? Campbell, bird or bloke? Last week, he was due to meet someone called Roger and it was a woman!”

  “That didn’t happen,” said Liddy sourly, walking into the corridor, thinking, What is it with all the “sharing” today? Curtis Oates, who was currently in reception barking at the girl to put on the Christmas “chill-out” album he had purchased on Liddy’s instruction, would never make such mistakes.

  “I asked him out on a date, but he said he was married. I said it didn’t matter, and he laughed and said I was charming but far too young for him.”

  Sydney stopped and looked at Liddy uncomprehendingly. “I mean, what sort of a man says that?”

  “Not me,” said Curtis Oates cheerfully, flashing his pearly veneers and running a hand through his hair transplant. “Liddy, it’s four p.m., the gal from the Times is here.”

  Over the speakers came the familiar organ introduction of “O Holy Night.” The tune did not soothe Liddy, and, still discombobulated by the contemplation of her not-niceness, she knew the interview would have to be postponed for the third time.

  “Oh, no,” she said. “I can’t do that now, Curtis.”

  “Why not? It’s good for business. Remember to mention our growth areas. Gays and geriatrics.”

  “Pfft . . .” She exhaled. “It’s the Style section. Do you ever read that? I won’t do it. I’m not in the mood.”

  He looked over at her.

  “Who gives a fuck?” he replied, and pointed toward her office before sashaying into his.

  “Quick. Look at this,” whispered Sydney, who had been googling. “I found a photo of Sebastian and his wife at their wedding.”

  Liddy glanced over because she couldn’t help herself. Mrs. Chloe Stackallan had straight blond hair, high cheekbones, and tiny ankles. She wore her cream lace Temperley gown as if it had been made for her, which it undoubtedly had. She had a bouquet of lily of the valley in one hand, as the other rested casually on Sebastian’s arm, and she was staring up at him adoringly.

  It was like the cover photograph of Perfect Bride magazine.

  “Wow,” said Sydney mournfully. “She’s . . . perfect. They look perfect together.”

  “Nothing’s perfect, Sydney,” said Liddy brusquely. “No matter how it looks.”

  This cheered Sydney up a little.

  “You’d better go, Liddy,” she said.

  Liddy sighed. The journalist had told her that she wanted to discover “the real Liddy James,” but Liddy had just seen her real self, and wanted that Liddy kept hidden.

  It’s showtime! she thought.

  “I DON’T DO GUILT”

  One of New York magazine’s top ten divorce attorneys, a best-selling author, and a regular contributor to the Huffington Post, Liddy James navigates the choppy waters of the Manhattan matrimonial law system with ease, and she does it in slippers. Corinthia Jordan has an appointment.

  The fact that Liddy James—mother, art lover, and senior partner in the firm of Oates and Associates—is relaxing in her glorious office on the Upper East Side, dunking chocolate cookies into her hot chocolate with her UGG-slippered feet up, is, she tells me, mainly the result of the newfound freedom she discovered in her forties.

  “I spent so much of my younger life worrying what people thought of me, and let’s face it, because I am a woman, worrying if they liked me, that it has been the greatest gift of aging to discover that I no longer care.”

  Her green eyes glitter meaningfully as she says this, and with her long, auburn hair and the fair, freckled complexion of a woman half her age—the genetic gifts of her Irish parents who brought her to America when she was nine years old—as well as the distinctive lope in her stride, which, she tells me, makes high heels impossible, James exudes a blithely unaffected but charismatic air. She leans back, a tableau vivant of magnificent midlife, and among her botanical prints, I spy a faded Polaroid of her with her sandy-haired sons, Matty and Cal James, ages thirteen and five, and an adorable scribble picture, emblazoned with superhero stickers, declaring BEST MOM IN THE WORLD. To my surprise there’s no treadmill desk or selfies with celebrity clients to be seen. Only the shark line drawing in the corner gives any indication of Liddy’s formidable professional reputation.

  “Oh, that,” she says, smiling when I point to it. “It was a present from a colleague.” I ask her if she is known as “the shark” in the office and she shrugs. “You know the amazing thing about sharks? If they stop swimming they drown. They have to move forward to survive. I totally relate to that.”

  On growing up in a low-income family in suburban New Jersey, she says, “Look, m
y parents were twenty-one when they married and had me. They fled the economic deprivation of Ireland in the 1980s in search of a better life here, but it didn’t work out exactly as they planned.” James made her escape through education. She graduated first in her class at Stanford Law School, then had her pick of any top legal firm on either coast. She chose the legendary Rosedale and Seldon in New York, where she quickly rewrote the rulebook on precourt settlements, only leaving seven years ago when Curtis Oates made her “an offer she couldn’t refuse.”

  Since then her career has reached new heights, including the publication of her controversial book Equality Means in Everything: A Divorce Lawyer’s Guide to Modern Matrimony, which came out two years ago in a blaze of publicity that swept it to number one on the New York Times bestseller list. Does she regret how certain chapters were reported?

  “There was certainly a lack of nuance about some points. I mean, I am a feminist, so to be portrayed as somehow anti-women was extremely hurtful. And seeking to punish a former partner through his or her wallet is far from an exclusively female pursuit! But I do stand by my view that marriage (and therefore divorce) isn’t a meal ticket. Women can’t pick and choose what gender equality means, and although I am well aware that nothing affects a woman’s career trajectory like having children, the financial responsibilities of the home should and must be shared, as parenting should and must be shared. No able-bodied person should assume that the lifestyle they enjoy because of their marriage will continue if that marriage ends. In other words, don’t give up work, ladies!”

  One on one, James expresses her views so forcefully and articulately that resistance seems useless, but many people disagree with her views, commenting that until cultural expectations of a woman’s role have changed dramatically, or women themselves are willing to relinquish the role of primary caretaker in the family, such a utopian vision of marital equality is impractical. How, I ask her, has she managed to juggle her own brilliant career with motherhood?

  “Imperfectly,” she replies cheerfully, then turns suddenly serious. “I was far too young when I first got together with my ex-husband (Peter James, a professor of English and American literature). I was a terrible wife and I broke his heart, but thanks to his fortitude, and that of his wonderful new partner, we managed a good divorce.”

  “So there is such a thing?” I ask. Her response surprises me.

  “Personally, I still don’t believe in divorce, particularly where there are children involved.”

  “What about prenups?” I ask.

  She replies without hesitation. “My boss, Curtis Oates, vehemently disagrees with me, but I think that’s like opening the exit doors of the plane before buckling your seat belt. If you’ve got doubts about getting married, don’t do it. That’s my advice.”

  And with this, she glances at the antique Jaeger-LeCoultre clock on her desk and shrugs in a disarmingly girlish manner. “I have to go. I’m making tuna surprise for dinner,” and, interview over, she offers to drop me off at a work event on her way home to her magnificent apartment in a landmark building in Tribeca.

  “Would you like to marry again?” I ask her as we sit in the back of the car.

  “Who would risk it?” she replies, laughing. “Anyway, it’s not on my radar at the moment. I am a single mother of two children, and the father of my younger son is not in our lives, so I don’t have a minute of spare time. Literally.” Before I can ask another question, she says firmly, “Cal was very wanted but not planned,” and I know better than to pursue the subject.

  The snow is falling heavily now and James opens her bag and pulls out a light-as-a-feather I Pezzi Dipinti shawl, which she wraps elegantly around her neck. “You must have read the interview with President Obama when he said he had to limit the number of decisions he had to make in one day, so his suits are all the same color. I share his philosophy. My capsule wardrobe is black and white—although every season I buy one key piece, like this dress, in a color—but the bottom line is, in my life I don’t want to think too much about anything I don’t have to.”

  I am struck by how rarely one meets a woman so bien dans sa peau, a woman at the top of her profession, who so successfully juggles a complicated domestic situation with the extraordinary demands of her career. As someone who struggles most mornings to run a brush through her hair before the school run, I wonder: What is the secret to her superproductive existence?

  “My irreplaceable nanny, Lucia, no personal life, and working late at night!” She laughs before continuing. “I accept I can’t do everything and I don’t try. I won’t ever be one of those frazzled women in dirty sweatpants, making brownies at midnight for a bake sale. I like order, because I am a Virgo. And I guess I don’t do guilt.”

  Rose Donato had a secret that made her happier than other women: she was an atheist who knew miracles could happen. This unshakable belief was born from the formative experience of her childhood, when her older brother Michael had fallen headfirst off a rope ladder, and in the six seconds he lay crumpled and motionless on the playground tarmac, her mother had fallen to her knees for the brief moments before he blinked awake again. Afterward Rose, aged seven, turned to her mother and asked what she had been doing. “I prayed for a miracle,” her mother said, before running off to holler at Michael, who was now balancing one-legged on top of a slide.

  Rose was an unusually thoughtful and wise child, so once she knew that such things could happen, she decided to harness the power. She imagined that a person might be allotted only so many miracles in one lifetime, but in teenage desperation she squandered two in rapid succession; first, when she prayed that the line of pimples that studded her forehead like red pushpins would disappear (which they did, by magic, two weeks later), and second, when she had to get two tickets to the Jacksons Victory Tour, and in the line for returns a kindly woman gave her the front-row seats her son was about to throw away. She would regret this when, aged thirty-two, at a time when she was not so secretly obsessing about rings and reproduction, Frank Pearson, who had been her room- and bedmate for ten years, casually left her for a woman he had met on the 6 train. The miracle of her rent-controlled apartment in the West Village and the senior lectureship she loved seemed like nothing after this, and when, three years later, she fell irrevocably in love at the first sight of Peter James, newly appointed professor of English and American literature, only to then meet his wife, the incomparable Liddy, she became convinced that she had used up her allocation.

  For five years she and Peter worked side by side, sharing milk cartons and ideas on semiotic literary criticism, as Rose discreetly avoided promotion and other suitable men. She reread Great Expectations and cherished her unrequited passion, until one day Peter appeared in the common room, gray-faced from sleeplessness, and told her that he and Liddy had separated. Rose reached out her right hand to touch his, the first time she had dared to be so intimate, and he looked at her as if for the very first time.

  She was forty years old that day; it took a year for him to want her, and so, when she moved into the town house in Carroll Gardens with the fig tree in the garden, and after three miscarriages in rapid succession, she abandoned her dream of a child and accepted it would be just the two of them. And soon it did not matter, at last she had him, it was the enough miracle—and of course there was his child too, Matty, whom she had first met as a tall and winning seven-year-old boy, and whom she had decided to love as if he were her own. And while their relationship had never become the one she had fantasized about, she dutifully cooked and cleaned and cared for him, which, from her outsider’s perspective, seemed at least ninety percent of what parenting was really about.

  “What are you reading?” said Peter. It was a bright February morning and he had walked into the kitchen to kiss the top of her head, but stopped at the sight of her, her hand leaning against her cheek, her soft beauty framed in the winter light of the French windows as if she were posing for
Vermeer. “You look completely absorbed.”

  Rose gulped. She had woken early and, unable to lie still, had half dressed and crept down the stairs, kidding herself she would get a head start on a paper about Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. But in fact, after an hour or so, she had stopped, too eager to read the Style section of the Times, which she had bought yesterday evening and had not yet had a moment alone to peruse. Cup of coffee in hand, Rose had crept across the room to the innocuous brown bag, slung across a wooden chair, whose contents seemed to be summoning her with an insistent read me, read me until she gave in and pulled the newspaper out, although as she did this she knew she should have waited until the apartment was empty. Liddy James, one of New York magazine’s top ten divorce attorneys, stared out at her from the front page, sitting, legs crossed, on a desk, hands by her sides, her face tilted up in a smile just the right edge of rictus but still ever-so-slightly fake. Rose began to read in case there was anything she needed to know about, and it had indeed been so absorbing, she had not heard Peter’s arrival, his socked footsteps on the stairs, the thump of his elbow against the warped wood of the kitchen door they had resolved to fix three years ago.

  She stood up, attempting to stuff the newspaper nonchalantly into the table drawer. It was no good. She was being furtive and he knew it.

  “What is it?” he said, walking toward her, curious now. Rose was the least furtive person in his acquaintance and she could never not tell the truth, even when she probably should.

  “It’s Liddy’s article in the Times yesterday. D’you remember? She warned us about it before Christmas.”

  Peter reminded himself that his determination to ignore Liddy’s self-promoting interviews (which inevitably portrayed a version of their marriage designed to fit whatever she was selling) had served him well in the past, and as she had recently reminded him with typical candor, the royalties from her book were paying Matty’s school fees and might even cover college. But there was something in Rose’s face this morning, a different brushstroke across her forehead.