Faking It With My Nemesis

PAIGE

By the end of my fourth year at Halvorsen & Doyle, I had read four hundred and twelve prenuptial agreements, and I could tell you exactly how love ended.

It ended in Schedule B.

Schedule B is where people list the things they’re afraid to lose. The house. The boat. The first-edition comic books in the climate-controlled unit on Gilman that the fiancée doesn’t know about yet. The vintage guitars. It’s always the vintage guitars. Nobody has ever gone to war over a toaster, but I have personally watched a grown man weep over a guitar his father bought in a pawnshop, and I have watched the woman who loved him agree to let him keep it in writing, in advance, in case she ever stopped loving him. That’s Schedule B. It’s the most romantic document in the world, and it’s a list of what people plan to take with them when they leave.

So when people ask if I’m a romantic, I say no. I’ve read the schedules.

“Section fourteen,” I said. “Subsection C.”

Across the conference table, Gerald Fitch folded his hands over his stomach like a man about to receive a compliment. He was sixty-four, he owned eleven car washes, and he was marrying for the fourth time, to a very nice retired dental hygienist named Lorraine, who was sitting beside her very tired lawyer and wearing the expression of a woman who had been engaged to Gerald for two years and knew what she was in for.

We were in the big conference room on fourteen, the one with the view of the cranes. It was January, and the cranes stood in the fog like enormous herons waiting for a verdict.

“Fourteen C is important to me,” Gerald said.

“I can see that. You underlined it. Twice. In the draft you sent us, you also bolded it, which I respect as a formatting choice.”

Lorraine’s lawyer made a small noise into his coffee.

Fourteen C said that the entire agreement would be void, and Lorraine would forfeit the house on the lake, if she ever mentioned the first three Mrs. Fitches at a family gathering. There was a definitions section. “Family gathering” included Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, “any birthday of a grandchild,” and, for reasons I did not want to explore, “the Fourth of July if at the lake.”

“Mr. Fitch,” I said, “I want to make sure I understand the goal. You don’t want Lorraine bringing up your former wives.”

“At family events. It’s a sore subject with the kids.”

“Of course. And there are three of them. Former wives.”

“Diane, Barbara, and the other Diane.”

“The other Diane.” I wrote that down, not because I needed it, but because a person should always write down the other Diane. “Here’s my concern. If we put a gag order on the first three Mrs. Fitches, the fourth one is going to read this and assume she’s entering witness protection.”

Lorraine laughed first. It came out of her like it had been waiting a long time, a real laugh, the kind that makes a room get warmer. Then her lawyer laughed. Then Gerald, who had the good grace to go pink around the ears, laughed too, and looked at Lorraine, and something in his face changed from a man negotiating to a man who had noticed the woman he was marrying.

“She’s not going to talk about them,” he said to me, but he was looking at her.

“I’m not going to talk about them,” Lorraine said. “Gerry. I don’t even know which Diane was which.”

“Then we don’t need fourteen C,” I said, and slid my red pen across the table.

He struck it himself. They always want to do it themselves. It’s the only part of the process that feels like a vow.

The deal closed by eleven. Lorraine hugged me in the elevator lobby, which clients are not supposed to do and always do, and Gerald shook my hand for a long time and told me I should do stand-up, and I said thank you, and meant it, and also felt the little click I always feel when someone says that, like a lock turning on a door I didn’t know I was standing behind.

❦

Nate Pruitt was putting golf balls into a coffee mug in the hallway.

Nate was a fifth-year associate who wore a quarter-zip to work every day as if he might be called away to a regatta. He had a putter in his office. He had named the putter. He looked up as I passed and said, in the voice men use to give you a present they found in their car, “Heard you killed in there, Bennett.”

“We closed.”

“Fitch was laughing so hard Marcy thought he was having an episode.” He tapped a ball toward the mug and missed. “You’re a lot of fun in there. Seriously. Clients love that.”

“Thank you, Nate.”

I kept walking. It was a compliment. It’s always a compliment. That’s how you know.

Here is what I have learned in four years at Halvorsen & Doyle: fun is the word they use when they’re deciding not to use a different word. Nobody calls the partners fun. The partners are sharp. The partners are formidable. The partners are someone you want across the table. When you are twenty-nine and you win things by making the other side laugh until they forget what they were fighting about, you are fun, and they say it warmly, and they mean it, and the door stays exactly where it is.

Diane Halvorsen came around the corner with her reading glasses on her head and a file under her arm. Diane was the managing partner. She had silver hair cut like a blade, she had once made a federal judge apologize to a court reporter, and she was the only person at Halvorsen & Doyle who had ever read my memos all the way to the footnotes.

“Nice work with Fitch,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“I heard the witness protection line from the break room.” She almost smiled. Diane’s almost-smiles were famous. People had built careers on less. “It was good. Maybe skip the material with the Hendersons on Thursday. They’re grieving a dog.”

“I wasn’t going to do material at the Hendersons.”

“You never plan to do material, Paige,” she said, not unkindly, and kept walking, and I stood in the hallway with my red pen in my hand and Nate’s golf ball rolling gently past my shoe.

Brilliant and unserious. Nobody had ever said it to my face. Nobody had to. It was the story of my life in three words, and I was the only one who seemed to be reading it.

❦

The invitation was waiting in my mailbox when I got home.

I live on the third floor of the Beaumont, on Linden Street, in a building with a brass mail slot, a lobby that smells faintly of radiator dust and somebody’s excellent curry, and a laminated sign by the stairs that says NO CATS. NO EXCEPTIONS. It is signed, with enormous feeling, MGMT, and I have always read it as a very specific grudge. My apartment has good bones and an ancient radiator that ticks like a bomb from November to May. Every night, somewhere around ten, it starts counting down to something, and every night I think, well, this is it, and every night it isn’t.

I knew what the envelope was before I opened it. It was heavy, and square, and addressed in a calligrapher’s hand that had clearly been paid by the letter, and on the back flap, in embossed silver, it said P & H.

I put it on the kitchen counter. I got out a wineglass.

I own eleven wineglasses and none of them match. I buy them one at a time from thrift stores, because a full set of anything feels like a promise I haven’t been asked to make. There is a tall one with a gold rim and a chip in the base, and that is the one I use for bad news. I poured the Barbera I keep for emergencies into the chipped one, drank half of it standing up, and opened the envelope with a butter knife like a woman defusing something.

In letterpress so deep you could read it with your thumb, it said that Graham Pryce and Whitney Hale requested the pleasure of my company at the Harbor Club on Saturday, the seventeenth of May, at five o’clock in the evening.

Reception to follow. Of course reception to follow. With Graham, there was always something to follow.

I want to be precise about this, because I am a lawyer and precision is the only thing I have that nobody can call fun.

Exhibit A: I dated Graham Pryce for two years. He was a corporate associate on the partnership track at one of the big firms downtown, the kind with a lobby that has a waterfall in it. He did mergers and acquisitions. My sister, who met him exactly twice, called him the Merger, and he called her Laura both times.

Exhibit B: Three and a half years ago, on a Sunday, in a restaurant with cloth napkins, Graham Pryce told me he wasn’t the marrying kind. He said it gently, over a very expensive piece of fish. He said he’d thought about it a lot and he just didn’t see himself doing the whole thing, the house, the ring, the forever. And then, because he was a thorough man and liked to close the loop, he reached across the table and squeezed my hand and said, “You’re the fun one, Paige. That’s not a criticism.”

Exhibit C: Fourteen months ago, Graham met Whitney Hale at a wellness retreat. Whitney is the founder of a company that makes a powder you put in water to make the water more expensive. She is tall and kind and does not drink, and she has a laugh like a wind chime, and she once told me at a gallery opening that my energy was “so generous,” which is the sort of thing you say to a woman who is being too loud near the canapés.

Exhibit D: Graham is now, apparently, the marrying kind.

The defense rests. The defense would like more wine.

I switched glasses for the second one, because I was committed to the bit, and took the invitation to the couch, which is green velvet and came from an estate sale and has held up under a great deal, including my sister for three weeks last spring. The radiator started counting. I opened my laptop.

The wedding website was sage green, with a font that looked like it did yoga. There were engagement photos on a beach. Whitney was laughing in all of them. Graham was looking at the camera in all of them, which told you everything you needed to know about Graham. There was a section called OUR STORY that I did not read, and then read, and then read again. They met at a retreat called Stillwater. He had been, the website said, “in a season of searching.”

He was in a season of searching for three and a half years. I was in a season of Boat Guy. Everybody grows in different directions.

The RSVP page asked if I would joyfully accept or regretfully decline.

At 11:40 p.m., according to the clock on my microwave, I joyfully accepted.

The next question said, Will you be bringing a guest?

Reader, I clicked yes.

The next field said, Guest’s name, and blinked at me, and I sat there with my second glass of wine and my radiator ticking and the specific, clarifying fury of a woman who has just been told by a sage-green website that the man who dumped her is in a season of joy. I typed To be announced. I hit submit.

The website thanked me. It said it couldn’t wait to celebrate with me. It used an exclamation point to say so.

I did not have a plus-one. I had not had a plus-one since Boat Guy, whose boat, and I want this on the record, had a bathroom in it, and I had not wanted one, and I had been very clear with everyone, including myself, that I was busy and happy and professionally fun.

What I had, on the second shelf of my bookcase, between my bar exam flashcards and a ceramic frog my sister made at summer camp, was a microphone. A real one, black, wired, in a padded case, because the microphones at the Fox & Finch have been inside a lot of mouths and I have standards.

I did not have a plus-one. I had a microphone.

I closed the laptop. The radiator ticked. Nothing exploded. It never does. That’s what gets you.

❦

Sunday dinner at Rourke’s starts at seven, and if you’re late, you’re seated by the kitchen door.

I have been seated by the kitchen door for three years.

Rourke’s is on a corner, under a black awning with ROURKE’S in white letters, and on a winter night the windows glow the color of good whiskey. Inside it’s exposed brick and amber lamps and dark wood, and a wall of wine behind the bar that I have been working my way through with the focus of a doctoral candidate, and a wood-fired oven in the back that makes the whole room smell like somebody loves you. On Sunday nights, the long table at the back under the tall windows belongs to us. Nobody remembers deciding that. It’s just true, like gravity, or the fact that Mateo will be there before you are.

Mateo was there at seven o’clock and zero seconds, with his glasses on and his shoulders taking up a respectable amount of the bench, and a spreadsheet open on his phone.

“What are we tracking?” I said, taking off my coat.

“Birthdays,” Mateo said. “Nobody sends me their birthdays.”

“You know my birthday.”

“I know you told me three different dates.”

“I contain multitudes.”

“You contain a data integrity problem,” Mateo said, and made a note.

The table was already mid-argument, which is how you know it’s a good table. Sadie was auditing the wine list out loud, because Sadie is Rourke’s wine rep and believes this entitles her to perform surgery on it in public. Luis, behind the bar, was polishing a glass with the specific violence of a man pretending not to hear. Priya had come straight from a twelve-hour shift in her rust sweater and was distributing electrolyte packets around the table like communion. Chloe was sketching the light fixtures on a napkin with a pen she’d produced from nowhere, her sleek black bob swinging forward, her face doing the thing it does where it is warm and entirely unreadable, like a lamp in someone else’s window.

My sister was glowing.