The House Girl (7 page)

T
HURSDAY

T
he polished top of Dan’s desk reflected a shimmering expanse of oily morning light. He looked refreshed, his shirt a glaring white, his tie a power red. His hair rose from his forehead in a freshly washed spirally frizz. A man sat in front of Dan’s desk, his back to the door. He did not turn as Lina entered.

“Good morning, Lina. Take a seat,” Dan said.

Lina sat in the empty chair to the man’s right. Behind Dan’s windows the sun hung like a curtain of heat and glare and unheard noise. The climate-controlled, custom-made, solid walnut bookshelves that housed Dan’s collection of antique law books turned on with a gentle hum.

“This is Garrison Hall. He’s a second year in litigation—have you guys met?”

Lina glanced across. She saw a straight length of nose, fullish lips, a clear smooth cheek, skin the color of a dull penny. Garrison Hall was gazing straight ahead, his body the model of careful attention, his head angled just so. Lina was sure he had gone to Yale Law; he had that air of casual intensity, carefully cultivated. She shook her head no, as did Garrison, without looking at her.

“So. Well.” Dan shifted his gaze from Lina to Garrison and then back again. “We’ve got a new matter I thought you two might be interested in. It’s something of a departure for the firm, but this came to us through an important client we’d like to be able to assist. And the marketing folks seem to think it will raise the profile of the firm in a positive way. You know, diversity.” Here he smiled directly at Garrison, showing abundant teeth, more gum than Lina had seen on display before. Garrison nodded slightly, as though he understood what this was all about.

“So the project is this—we’ve agreed to assist a client, Ron Dresser of Dresser Technology, on a reparations claim, historical reparations. You may have heard about this stuff in the news. It’s new legal theory, really groundbreaking stuff. Dresser Tech works primarily in oil and gas, as you probably know, engineering and logistics work. Big projects for the government, petrochemical companies, that sort of thing. This lawsuit is something of a departure for them, to say the least.” Dan snorted a laugh, picked up a pen, and began to helicopter it with the thumb and index finger of his right hand. Lina watched the pen twirl.

“The claim is for slaves, I mean ex-slaves, ancestors of slaves, great-great-
great
-grandchildren of slaves, to claim money from roughly twenty private companies that benefited way back when from slave labor. We’ve cleared them all with the conflicts department, so long as we isolate you two. No discussing this case with
anyone
. Understood?” Dan’s brow crinkled sternly. Lina nodded a solemn yes. “Now the federal government will also be an initial plaintiff, to maximize the monetary claim and for … well, for publicity purposes more than anything else. We’ll be using an unjust enrichment theory, mixed with crimes against humanity to get around the time-bar problem. It’s a stretch, of course”—Dan laughed, nervously it seemed to Lina—“but Mr. Dresser is pretty confident he wants to give it a go. And we’re happy to help him. So long as he keeps paying us for all the deal work we do for him.” Dan pointed to one of the deal toys on his desk,
Dresser Technology
etched in italic Palatino across a leaping crystal horse, an easy $5,000 worth of useless corporate kitsch.

“And you two immediately came to mind—I mean, Garrison, I understand some of your um, some of your ancestors were once, at some point in time, enslaved?”

Garrison nodded, the movement almost imperceptible. Lina could not hear his breathing.

“And Lina, I know you enjoyed that asylum case you did in law school. So here’s your chance for some more pro bono!” Dan looked at her brightly, eyebrows pushing toward the ceiling. “It’s not straightforward pro bono, of course. If we manage to get a settlement, or even win it, we’ll get paid. But we’re not billing in the normal way, so it’s
similar
to pro bono. It’s in the same
spirit,
if you know what I mean.”

“But I’ll still get full credit for the hours?” Lina asked.

“Of course.”

“And for bonus purposes?” This from Garrison.

“Obviously. Now, I’ll be the partner on this. You’ll be doing all the legwork but I’ll be steering the project. We’ll be meeting with Mr. Dresser tomorrow, eight
A.M
., to talk specifics.” Dan glanced at his watch, then toward the door. “Sooooo—great! Any questions?”

Lina opened her mouth to speak—about charging dinners and cabs—but Dan launched again. “Oh, and one last thing—we’re on a tight time frame here. Dresser Tech has a lot of ongoing defense-related contracts. It’s a busy time. Mr. Dresser’s got to stay in the good graces of the feds, but apparently he’s gotten a green light from within the administration to go ahead with this case. They focus-grouped it, I kid you not. Something to shift attention away from all this Abu Ghraib, WMD, yadda yadda. But our window is
small
. I don’t know all the specifics, only that we’ve got to get the initial complaint researched, written, and on Dresser’s desk in just over two weeks. I know that’s tight but”—he shrugged—“what can we do? We’ll get it done. It is what it is. Right, team? Great! Well, thanks for stopping by.”

Dan picked up his phone, fingers poised over the buttons, and smiled at them: leave.

I
N THE HALL, WITH
D
AN’S
office door closed behind them, Garrison turned to Lina. He was tall and narrow as a pencil. The intelligence in him, the watchfulness, was sharp as one of Oscar’s palette knives.

“Hi, Lina. Feels like we should meet again,” he said, smiling, and stretched out his hand.

“Hi.” Lina took his hand and eyed him, unsure about the niceness; unsolicited friendliness was a rarity at Clifton. He radiated authority and a measured calm, as though he were entirely unconcerned with what others might think of him. Lina thought that she might grow to like him, or hate him, or, more probably, she would never know him well enough to decide.

“You know, Dresser Tech does a ton of stuff in Iraq,” Garrison said, his voice low. “Like Halliburton, but more below the radar.”

“Hmm.” Lina had not known this, though she did not want to admit it.

“He’s tight with Cheney too, apparently. They’re golf buddies. Or hunting. One of those. Dresser’s taking a risk with this case, even with the green light. Suing the government? He must have a strategy worked out. I mean, don’t shit where you eat, right?”

Lina nodded tentatively. “I see what you’re saying.”

“Hey, we should have lunch sometime this week.” Garrison’s confidential tone gave way to a friendly buoyance. “Looks like it’ll just be the two of us working on this.”

“Usually I just eat at my desk,” Lina said.

Garrison stared at her blank-faced and Lina thought, without any degree of alarm, that she had effectively quashed his attempts at collegial chitchat. “You know, they do let first-year associates exit the building during daytime hours. The security guards won’t tackle you. At least not if you tip them.” He smiled, and all at once Lina’s jaw relaxed, a coiled tightness within her loosened, and she returned the smile.

“Lunch would be great,” she said. “Thanks for the invite.”

“Okay then. My secretary will set it up.” Garrison looked at his watch. “Crap, I’ve got to run. Conference call with London in five. See you later,” and Garrison slid down the hall, hands in pockets.

As Lina watched him go, she felt strangely heartened by the encounter. It was not unreasonable to think she might have a friend at the office, was it? Since she’d started at Clifton, her professional life had been confined to billing hours, attending client lunches and firm events, keeping afloat with a frantic dog-paddle in the competitive fishbowl where she and the other junior associates circled, sharp-eyed and wary. But Garrison’s calm chattiness seemed removed from all of that, as though he had worked out his own set of rules for navigating Clifton. Yes, maybe she could grow to like him.

Lina turned and headed toward the elevator bank. The layout of every floor at Clifton & Harp was the same. The secretaries, paralegals, and assistants sat in a warren of cubicle space located in the center of any given floor. The lawyers resided along the building’s perimeter in square-box offices with doors that closed and one wall of floor-to-ceiling window that opened them up to sunshine and vertigo. Like a gnat on an SUV windshield, that’s how Lina had felt when she first walked into her office. Like if she chanced too close to the glass wall, she would tumble noiselessly out into open air.

Lina exited the elevator and walked the east corridor toward her office. To her left, the secretaries buzzed and clacked and sipped. The secretaries were an exotic, unfathomable breed, prone to wearing elasticized waistbands and acrylic fingernails that clattered in a high-pitched musical way across a keyboard. The secretaries never asked questions. They deciphered the lawyers’ scrawl as best they could, settled into their ergonomically correct workstations, suspended all independent thought, all personal convictions, and typed.

To Lina’s right, half-open office doors allowed her glimpses of heads bowed over papers or fixed tightly to the glow of a computer screen or cradling a gray telephone headset between shoulder and ear. A whispery quiet prevailed. The wall outside each associate’s office was adorned with a black plastic placard grooved in style-free white lettering that announced the resident of each particular zone, good solid names like Helen, Louise, Ted, James, Amanda, Blake. Lina’s ex-boyfriend Stavros had interviewed at Clifton but had not received an offer, an event that had seemed mystifying and tragic for a few short weeks but that Lina now considered to be for the best. Stavros had gone to a small intellectual property firm in San Francisco and seemed happy there—at least that’s what he’d said in the two e-mails he’d sent since starting work last fall. None of Lina’s law school friends had ended up at Clifton either; most were at other firms in New York though she rarely saw them. Everyone was hectic, overextended with cases, deals, billable-hour targets. Although born and raised in New York, Lina often felt now like a solitary newcomer to a thrilling, strange city, the City of Law.

Lina arrived back at her office. The perpetually poised Meredith was speaking loudly about hedging the yen, her voice echoing out of her office and down the hall. Sherri, Lina’s secretary, perched in her cubicle wearing a fluffy yellow sweater and large hoop earrings; she appeared to be reading the newspaper. Sherri’s dark hair flounced over her forehead and ears and down her back in a series of complicated layers and curls, a thing so large and effortful that Sherri’s head seemed more a display case for the hair than the hair an accessory to the head. Sherri was secretary to five other lawyers, all senior to Lina. Lina never asked much of Sherri, only to answer Lina’s phone when she wanted to avoid speaking to someone and, once, to proofread a two-page letter for typos. (Sherri had found none.)

“Oh, Lina,” Sherri called.

“Yes?” Lina paused by the entrance of Sherri’s cubicle zone.

“Two things. One, the Yankee broke up with Meredith!” This Sherri mock-whispered, one hand held to the side of her mouth. “Just this morning, first thing! You should have heard the cussing!” And here she was: gleeful Sherri, joyful and enthusiastic, brown eyes bright, cheeks aglow. Only in moments like these, when juicy office gossip was in desperate need of dissemination, did Sherri’s default posture of bored disinterest fall away. The secretaries had full access to the e-mail accounts of the lawyers for whom they worked and there seemed to exist an unwritten code of information sharing among them: any noteworthy matter, personal or professional, was dispersed cubicle to cubicle, floor to floor with the speed of an airborne tropical virus. The ethics of this were straightforward and unassailable: any lawyer fool enough to conduct their personal life via a work e-mail account deserved to have their secrets revealed to the Clifton & Harp populace.

Lina gave her stock gossip-response smile of part shock, part disapproval, part delight. “Wow, that was fast!”

“I
know
. Not even six months.” Sherri’s eyes widened.

Lina waited. “And the second? You said there were two things?”

“Oh, yeah.” Gleeful Sherri vanished. With great care, she picked with a fingernail at a front incisor. “Dan phoned. You’re meeting with Mr. Dresser tomorrow morning. Conference room … oh, which one was it? I can’t remember. Call facilities and they’ll have the booking.” Sherri turned back to her newspaper; her brow furrowed immediately with grave concentration.

As always, Lina felt powerless in the face of Sherri’s secretarial indifference. She had tried, how Lina had tried! Movie tickets, thank-you e-mails studded with exclamation points, vanilla lattes delivered to Sherri’s desk. But all Lina’s efforts were met with the same emotionless smirk and an apathy so clear it seemed manufactured from glass.

For a moment Lina lingered, and then, inspired by the amiable Garrison Hall, resolved to try a new strategy. Lina would invite Sherri to lunch. A conversation, a shared meal, and afterward their relationship would blossom and Sherri would never again shunt Lina’s phone calls to voice mail, or miss the FedEx deadline, or forget a conference room number. But before Lina could speak, a red light blinked on Sherri’s phone and she answered the call. “Meredith Stewart’s office,” she said with authority, and began writing a lengthy telephone message in looping longhand.

Lina retreated slowly to her office. She picked up her phone, called facilities, and got the conference room number for tomorrow’s meeting. Room 2005, twentieth floor. Eight
A.M
. Breakfast not provided.

Three heads turned toward Lina as she opened the meeting room door. She was five minutes early and yet, apparently, the last to arrive. It was raining and she had not stopped at her office to unload her coat and bag and now, standing in the doorway, struggling out of her wet yellow slicker, she wished she had. The men watched her for a moment, then swiveled away and resumed talking.