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“Animals?” he said, and he let out a dog bark. Ana stared, and James felt all the lust draining from him as his wife frantically pushed down her short hair, which was perfect, entirely in place.
He breathed in the cold and made a declaration: “Let’s take a cab.”
Rick Saliman had spent thousands of dollars bonding his teeth, and the result, when he pulled back the curtains of his lips, was a strange erasure of the lines between each tooth. Something smooth and terrifying, resembling a long, narrow bar of soap, sat where his smile should have been.
“James,” he said, and gripped James’s hand like they were jumping from a cliff together. This was Rick’s greeting: No hello, just the loud singular recitation of a name. On the strength of this fantastic memory, and three decades of practice, the Saliman name was second on the firm’s stationery, right after the dead McGruger.
“Rick,” said James. Ana swooped over the waitress walking by and grabbed a glass of white for her, red for James.
“She does everything for you, is that right, James? Even gets the drinks these days?”
Ana tried a laugh.
“Only the things that matter,” said James, raising his glass for emphasis.
Ana left his side, beckoned by a wave from Elspeth, who stood with two young associates, new hires. One was blond, breakably thin beneath feathery hair; she reminded Ana of Woodstock, Snoopy’s friend. The other was tall, taller even than Ana, and less pretty, but she exuded a kind of burned anger—her eyes narrowed when offered Ana’s hand.
“Jeanine is working with Steven’s group,” said Elspeth, and the tall one gave an exhausted sigh topped by a world-weary smile that Ana found falsely mature for her face.
The blond one gazed sleepily around the room as if looking for a place to nap.
Ana felt a pull in the back of her head, an interior whisper—How’s Fi
“What’s wrong?” asked Ana, who hadn’t sought out this moment but was merely on her way to the bathroom.
“My son’s sick,” said Elspeth.
Taken aback, Ana said: “You have a son?” And the son was sick, which could mean a cancer boy, bald in a ward somewhere being entertained by a volunteer clown. “Is he all right? What do you mean, sick?”
“Oh, he’ll be fine. But the school sent him home, and my day na
She put her hand on Elspeth’s arm and offered a Kleenex from her pocket. She rode down in the elevator with her and put her in a cab. The look of sheer gratitude on Elspeth’s face when she glanced back through the glass filled Ana with self-loathing. Why was there so little altruism in her? She thought about those workplace surveys that get published in national magazines and newspapers once or twice a year: Is this a good place for women to work? In truth, the firm was not, but Ana liked the idea of working in a place that was and decided this was a moment in which to pretend otherwise.
Since that day, Elspeth had confided in Ana from time to time. Shutting Ana’s door behind her, she gingerly showed her photographs of the kids. Ana nodded and murmured, and Elspeth relaxed into it eventually, growing more familiar, bitching about this and that family matter, presenting Ana with a picture of a life that was torturous in many ways, all drop-offs and pickups and na
One time, she forwarded Ana a family photo from a weekend vacation to an amusement park. The kids tumbling off Elspeth’s lap in front of a fiendish cartoon mascot, and Tom, Elspeth’s husband, at the edge of the picture with half his body sliced away. This was the image Ana saw in her mind’s eye whenever Elspeth spoke of her family, whom Ana had never actually met.
No one else at work spoke of Elspeth’s outside life. She was sober and efficient, stayed until nine or ten at least two nights a week, took the bare minimum holidays, and moved up fast. And Ana would be next, everyone said, the next woman to make partner. Soon.
Ana heard the low laughing of the men growing more boisterous; drink three had been drunk, the volume was increasing. She grabbed a second glass of wine from the tray, dropping down her empty glass and taking a long, deep sip. Ana looked across at James, nodding as Rick gesticulated. These parties were one of the few places in the world where Ana saw James being deferential. She took this for love.
Ana recalled that Rick’s desk contained a photograph of two children, sunburned on a boat, but he hadn’t spoken of them in years, or not to Ana. Perhaps only Elspeth dared confide in the hollow crone. She thought of the word “childless,” spreading like a fungus across her, infecting everyone: She is less a child, so don’t dangle yours in front of her or she might snatch it away.
Ana was overcome with the sensation that she needed to speak. “Where are your kids tonight?” she asked Elspeth. The young women glanced about, surprised.
“Tom—my husband,” said Elspeth, for the benefit of the juniors. “He has them, of course. He would never come to one of these things.”
“One of your na
Elspeth smiled. “That’s right. How strange.”
The blond one inquired politely of Ana: “How many children do you have?”
“Oh, none. I just borrowed one from a sick friend.” The three women shifted. Elspeth tried to intervene.
“Ana’s a godmother to a little boy whose mother is in the hospital. He’s staying with her.”
“Godmother? Oh, Elspeth. That makes it sound so profound. Fabulous. Can I start using that phrase?”
Ana knew that this bitchy streak was awakened only with alcohol, yet she replaced her empty wineglass with a full one as the young waitress walked by. She took another sip.
The blond one took a swallow of her drink, as if steeling herself for what she was dying to ask.
“So it’s possible, then, to have children and work here? I never hear anyone talk about that. The statistics about women lawyers …” Ana noticed a huge ring on her finger, an eyeball-sized diamond. She won’t be working in a year, thought Ana.
“Of course it’s possible. You don’t have to sacrifice every feminine experience to be successful,” said Elspeth in a hectoring voice. Ana dwelled on the word “feminine,” picturing her childless self mustachioed, wearing a hard hat. “I’m surprised someone from your generation would subscribe to such a retrograde notion.”
The blond woman colored pink.