The Real Liddy James

by Anne-Marie Casey

  Liddy nodded slowly, and Lucia turned to leave. Then she stopped.

  “Give that dirty dog away, Mama,” she said.

  She returned to the party. Liddy turned to Rosita.

  “I’ll pay for your mother’s flight.”

  “No, no, you don’t need to. I got it.”

  “You’re a very good daughter.”

  “My mama did everything for me,” Rosita replied.

  “Yes.”

  Behind them, the sea lions barked in what now seemed to Liddy like a mournful ululation.

  “Oh, Rosita, we’ll miss her not being around. Poor Cal.”

  The Delacorte clock chimed three.

  “He’ll get used to it,” said Rosita, and she stared right into Liddy’s eyes. “I did.”

  Hurrying into the lobby of the St. Regis, she located Curtis immediately by his low, sulphurous cackle. But as she ran over to the fireplace, she realized he was talking on his phone, the chair opposite him empty. When he saw her he hung up with an excited flourish.

  “Where’s the mystery client?” asked Liddy.

  “In the powder room. I told her I’d fill you in.”

  “What’ve we got?”

  “Three years married, they lived in the husband’s apartment on the Upper East Side, some stocks, shares, all his, and a summer place they bought after the wedding.”

  “Does she work?” asked Liddy. “I mean, outside the home?” she added quickly.

  “Fashion PR. But she gave it up when they married to start a family.”

  “Did they?”

  “No. No kids.”

  “Curtis, this is a straight down the line no-fault. There’s nothing in this for us, unless the husband’s a miserly multimillionaire with a lot of hidden assets. Is he?”

  “No. He’s like you and me. Look, she wants you.”

  Irritation rose within Liddy.

  “I’m off,” she said scratchily. “You can explain what I was doing here tomorrow. Give her the number of that woman on Riverside Drive who does mediation. It’ll be done in a few days—”

  “You don’t understand, Liddy. Her great-aunt is Lisbeth Dawe Bartlett.”

  Liddy sat down in the empty chair. Lisbeth Dawe Bartlett, a billionaire nonagenarian heiress who refused to die, was Curtis’s most valued client (he often said that his relationship with her was the longest and happiest of his entire life). Providing a legal service for any member of her family, however distant, was compulsory.

  “Then she’s loaded. What about her assets? Did you do the prenup?”

  “Let’s just say she’s benefited from the estate-planning services of Oates and Associates. Of course Lisbeth won’t let her starve, but the real cash goes to her kids—when she has them.”

  He looked around and lowered his voice.

  “She’s a bit . . . bitter . . . to be honest. She wants the apartment, a chunk of the shares . . . as much as we can get her, basically. I need you to run it all up the flagpole and see what flies. And by the way, Lisbeth has a particular interest in her so I promised you would be available—don’t tell her she should get a therapist, whatever you do. If she wants to talk to you about anything, you listen. It’s on Lisbeth’s clock.”

  “Who’s the husband’s attorney?”

  “Sebastian Stackallan.”

  Liddy burst out laughing.

  “You’re dreaming, Curtis. We don’t have a hope.”

  But Curtis grinned maniacally.

  “Oh, yes, we do,” he said, standing up to greet the returning client. “This is the fun bit!”

  Liddy turned.

  A slender woman in a cream trench coat, a perfect sheet of blond hair over her shoulders, approached them daintily on her four-inch heels. She was holding a small leather purse in her hands and Liddy’s attention was drawn to her tiny wrists, where the white skin stretched translucent, revealing the patterning of blue veins beneath like the branches of a fragile tree.

  Liddy stared at her. She was sure she recognized her from somewhere.

  “Hi, Liddy,” said the woman. “I’m Chloe Stackallan.”

  Chloe Stackallan in the flesh was proof of the failure of mechanical reproduction to reflect the aura of a work of art. The photograph Sydney had shown Liddy of Chloe as the perfect bride had still utterly failed to convey the reality of Chloe’s extraordinary beauty. Liddy was momentarily transfixed by her patrician perfection. Then she pulled herself together.

  “Hi, Chloe,” said Liddy. “It’s good to meet you, although I’m sorry for the circumstances.”

  “Thank you, Liddy.”

  It took only a graceful wave of Chloe’s manicured hand for two liveried doormen to appear with a chaise longue onto which she reclined. Liddy wondered what it must be like to have that as a superpower.

  “Tell me why you want to end your marriage,” said Liddy.

  Chloe bristled. She considered such straight talking a little vulgar.

  “We’ve been arguing for months and I can’t go on anymore,” she said.

  She waved her hand again. This time a waiter arrived with jasmine tea.

  “Sebastian blames me, you see. But it’s not like you can get pregnant to order, is it? I mean, God knows I want a baby. I’ve been a vegetarian since I was thirteen years old and yet I’ve had to eat mackerel every week for two years to improve my fertility.”

  Curtis was not sure what expression to adopt here so he went for “avuncular sympathy.”

  “He’s like that English king who kept chopping off his wives’ heads because they didn’t produce an heir.”

  “Henry the Eighth?” suggested Liddy.

  “Exactly. He’s not the person I thought he was. I should never have married him. He doesn’t value me like he should.”

  She paused and lifted the cup to her lips, the slight tremor in her fingers betraying her outrage, and in that moment Liddy understood the story of their marriage. Chloe was a woman reared to be a holy grail of womankind, a reward for a handsome, wealthy bachelor who had spent years playing the field in search of it. The idea that a man might hand back such a prize was incomprehensible to her.

  “Okay,” said Liddy. “Any drugs, alcohol, cruel or inhumane treatment?”

  “Apart from the mackerel eating . . .” said Curtis to lighten the tone, but Chloe’s lips pursed so tightly they almost disappeared.

  “Abandonment? Imprisonment?”

  Chloe shook her head.

  “Infidelity?”

  Chloe looked surreptitiously side to side.

  “Only once,” she said, “but I promise he’ll never find out.” She looked at Curtis. “I was desperate,” she said. Curtis looked back and tried to convey the unspoken message that in similar circumstances she could always give him a call.

  “So,” she continued. “What can you get for me? Ballpark, of course.”

  Liddy glanced at Curtis, who nodded at her to speak. He and Liddy were a practiced double act. They knew the steps to this dance of expectation management.

  “I’m sure Curtis has told you what a fair settlement for a childless three-year marriage looks like under New York State law.”

  Chloe raised a hand to indicate that Liddy should stop talking. Liddy did not like this, but she stopped anyway.

  “Sebastian keeps telling me he will be ‘fair,’ too. I don’t want what’s fair.” She paused. “I want what I deserve.”

  She leaned forward to make her point.

  “Before Sebastian met me, he never went out, he had no taste, he didn’t know where to go on vacation and every night he used to sit on his own at home listening to music and smoking cigars. Yes, of course there were women, lots and lots of women, and people said he couldn’t be tamed, but I did it! It took me a while, but I did it! I gave him a life!”

  At this moment, Lid
dy found herself wondering how on earth the marriage had lasted as long as three years. She had enough sense of Sebastian’s personality to know that he would not stay happy in a cage, however tasteful, for very long. It also worried her that, like any wild animal, he might chew off one of his own limbs to escape. He was a relentless adversary on the best of days; what he might do under this kind of provocation would be lengthy, expensive, and bloody.

  “Your best chance of a decent lump sum will be for lost income,” said Liddy.

  Chloe looked confused.

  “You need to send me a very detailed breakdown of your earnings before you were married.”

  “When I worked for Manolo he paid me in shoes!” Chloe shrieked, quivering.

  She turned to Curtis. “I’ve got no job and nowhere to live. I’m older than I look, you know. Six of the best years of my life! Wasted! On him!”

  “I understand,” said Liddy with practiced calm. “You gave him the priceless gift of your childbearing years, but in law it counts for nothing. I’m sorry. If we’re lucky, we’ll get you half a million dollars all in.”

  “That’s it? That’s not near enough!”

  And with that, she burst into tears.

  “Dear Chloe, try not to get so emotional, it won’t help you,” said Curtis.

  Liddy looked at him. “I disagree. Emotion may be the only thing we have to help us.”

  She handed Chloe a napkin.

  “Let’s forget judicial reasoning and equitable division for a moment. Put yourself in Sebastian’s heart, Chloe. What does he care most about in the whole world?”

  “His mother,” said Chloe quickly. “He’s devoted to her. She used to be an actress, Roberta Stackallan, but you won’t have heard of her, she never made it in America. All she does now is the odd voice-over for things like bladder support underwear, cash Sebastian’s checks, and get married—five times so far, and counting. When we first met, she was living in a druidic community. I had to watch her go through the cauldron of rebirth. Honestly, it’s no wonder he’s the way he is. When I rang her to say how he treated me, she wouldn’t listen. She said he was her son and she could see no wrong in him, so perhaps I should reconsider my own behavior. And she wasn’t so polite about it, let me tell you—”

  “She’s not an asset, she’s a liability,” said Curtis, trying another joke, and this time Chloe rewarded him with a chuckle, fixing him in the full beam of her white teeth.

  “Indeed,” said Liddy. “What I’m looking for is an emotional asset. Is there something, anything, that he would sacrifice everything else to keep?”

  A tiny, catlike smile played on Chloe’s lips.

  “The house in Ireland,” she said.

  “Ireland?” said Liddy. “Is it valuable?”

  She had a vague recollection of Sebastian mentioning a family home during their date from hell. She remembered, ruefully, that he had also announced that he was “not a marrying man.” Too right, she thought, then she stopped; it had also turned out that she was “not a marrying woman.”

  Chloe shook her head. “No. It’s tiny and there’s never enough hot water, but it’s the gate lodge on the land of the house he grew up in, where Roberta still lives. She sold it once when she was broke, in between husbands two and three, and he waited years to buy it back. He’ll never give it up.” She paused. She raised her hand to her mouth and her fingers trembled slightly. “He told me it was his dream to walk those fields with his children.”

  “Excellent,” said Liddy. “We’ll say you want it and use it as leverage to get you an enhanced settlement.”

  “How will it help?” asked Chloe, looking at Curtis.

  “It’s joint marital property,” said Liddy. “If we went to court, the disparity of your assets would have to be taken into account. Sebastian owns the Manhattan apartment outright, and if we were convincing enough, the judge might award the house in Ireland to you. Sebastian can’t take that risk. Start thinking of reasons you might want to live there.”

  Liddy glanced at her watch: 3:35.

  “I have to go,” she said.

  Chloe leapt to her feet and hugged Liddy like an excited child. “I want this behind me. I want to get married again. Get it done, Liddy! You know Sebastian’s your number one fan. He says you’re the best divorce lawyer in town—he used to be cross if he saw your name on court papers. Honestly, when we first met I thought he had a bit of a . . . thing . . . for you!”

  “No danger of that,” said Curtis, chuckling.

  Liddy extricated herself with a firm good-bye and headed toward the car. Curtis hurried after her.

  “Don’t be so sulky. Everyone knows you hate Stackallan.”

  She stopped. She turned. Her performance over, she could not conceal her weariness.

  “I don’t hate Mr. Stackallan. I hate this case. I wrote a book called Equality Means in Everything, remember, where I spent a whole chapter arguing why stuff like this should never happen. ‘Marriage is not a meal ticket, et cetera, et cetera. . . .’ She’s already looking for husband number two. Doesn’t seem to occur to her that she could get a job!”

  Vince was standing outside holding the car door open.

  “And by the way, Curtis, she definitely needs a therapist. She can’t always have been as demented as this. She’s got a strange glint in her eye. She’s either medicated or she’s been watching too many episodes of The Good Wife. She wants her moment in court.”

  Curtis shrugged.

  “If people were mentally healthy, we’d be out of business.”

  Liddy growled as she climbed in.

  “You’re losing your sense of humor, Liddy,” he called as Vince closed the door firmly behind her.

  Back at the party zone, trestle tables were covered with green plastic tablecloths, and speakers in the corner played the sounds of the Amazon rain forest, although the real roar was not from cockatoos or distant howler monkeys but from overexcited and screeching children, their faces painted like frogs and lions. When Liddy entered, Cal was sitting on Lucia’s lap while she smothered him in kisses. Peter was hiding beside a tissue paper collage, comfort eating chips off a paper plate.

  “Where’ve you been? You missed all the games,” Peter said.

  “I don’t get to do everything I’d like to,” she replied briskly. She was not in the mood.

  “I’m sure Lucia was filming it all.”

  Matty lumbered toward them, an enormous birthday cake perilously resting in his arms.

  “Did you remember matches, Mom? For the candles,” he said.

  The cake was decorated with a banana and six monkeys, a candle stuck unceremoniously into each of their heads. Matty set it on the plastic tablecloth.

  “I did,” she replied, pulling a red Zippo lighter out of her pocket and lighting them. Dwayne and Leona started to sing as the kids gathered around. Peter and Liddy stood side by side as Matty helped Cal blow out the flames.

  Liddy turned to Peter.

  “Lucia’s leaving us.”

  “What? What on earth are you going to do?” he said.

  “Handle it, of course.” She paused. “Peter, I want to thank you for your help today. I really appreciate it.”

  He nodded.

  “And now you should go. You’ve done enough,” she said. He did not disagree. Liddy called Matty and Cal over.

  “Cal. Say good-bye to Matty. He’s off with his dad now.”

  Cal had an icing sugar monkey in his mouth, so they waited patiently as the brown legs disappeared down his throat and he chewed up the authentic pink soles of the feet. He tapped his head against Matty’s arm, waved at Peter, and then looked up at Liddy plaintively.

  “Where’s MY dad, Mama?”

  Words failed Liddy.

  She looked at Peter for help, but the small muscle on the right side of his face tightened as he sho
ok his head and walked slowly toward the door. His shoulders had slumped once more under the heavy weight of his bitterness.

  She knelt down and held Cal very tight.

  “Your dad lives a long way away,” she said. Cal thought about this for a moment, and then nodded. It seemed to satisfy him, temporarily at least, and he hurried off to look for Lucia and another slice of cake.

  Liddy looked up. Matty was shaking his head.

  “You’re going to have to tell him more than that, Mom,” he said seriously. “You don’t want Cal thinking he was, like, stolen, or cloned in a lab, or bought from a surrogate.”

  “It’s age appropriate,” said Liddy, ending the discussion. She grabbed Matty’s arm and led him toward Peter, who was now discussing the cake with Louisa Tilney.

  “It looks amazing,” Louisa was saying. “But they always taste disappointing. You’d think for all that money they’d use butter.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he replied grumpily. “It’s just a prop.”

  Liddy waited for Louisa to leave.

  “What does that mean, Peter?” she demanded.

  “It means what I said.” And with that, he walked away from her again, his voice getting louder as he went farther, which was disconcerting.

  “You think my life is fake?” she snarled, her tone so sharp it made Matty look frightened.

  “It doesn’t matter what I think,” said Peter. “You went to work in the middle of this party, didn’t you?”

  “So what if I did?” She looked around. “The ‘props’ cost a lot.”

  He looked around. His gaze alighted on Cal. “They certainly did,” he said, more cruelly than he meant. Then he looked at the ground in shame.

  “Mom! Dad! Stop it!” said Matty.

  Liddy stopped, chagrined.

  She moved slowly toward Peter. She put her hand on his shoulder. She whispered in his ear. “Forgive me.” She pulled back, but their faces were still very close.

  “Why did you call him Cal James, Liddy?”

  She paused. It was another question she had not expected today.

  “For the same reason I took your name. I think everyone in a family should be called the same.”