Thomas Perry - Dead Aim

Sitting with him was disconcerting. His face was turned toward her, but his eyes kept focusing on a point beyond her left shoulder, as though he were a sly enemy watching someone sneak up behind her and trying to keep her from noticing. His conversation made the feeling stronger, because he was only prodding her into talking, to keep her calm and distracted, while he kept refocusing his eyes on Mary O’Connor, who was sitting alone in a booth thirty feet away.

“Did you come to this restaurant when you worked in Washington?”

“No,” she answered. “It’s a nice place, but most of its business comes because it’s in the hotel. I think I was here maybe twice, just to meet out-of-town clients who were staying here and get them to pretend to read something and then sign it.”

“Pretend to read it?”

She nodded, then realized that he was looking past her again, so she said, “Yes. Nobody can eat a meal and really read a legal document while a lawyer is sitting across the table providing helpful offers to explain anything that’s not clear. If a lawyer really wanted him to understand it, the document would have been sent to him in advance. So they just pretend to read all of it, trying to buy the lawyer’s respect by seeming to read rapidly and understand instantly. But they’re distracted by the food, which is tantalizing, and it’s also threatening because they want to eat it and are afraid it will get cold or the waiter will take it away, but they can’t. They have to listen to what the lawyer is saying so they won’t offend her or make her think they’re stupid. And they’re concerned about how they look.”

“How they look?”

“Sure. Vanity. They’re afraid to spill something on themselves. And do they look important to the strangers around them, reading contracts at lunch, or do they just look crude and commercial?”

“And how they look to the lawyer?”

“Of course,” she agreed.

“When we talked before, you always seemed to resent that you were treated differently from the men,” said Parish. “But it seems to me that what you’re describing is you using your sexual attractiveness to confuse the other party in an agreement.”

Her face flattened. She felt a wave of hot irritation at the nape of her neck. “My using it is different. It’s mine to use. Mine,” she repeated. “Not theirs.”

“When a firm hires a lawyer, aren’t they hiring the whole person?”

He was looking closely at her now. She wished he would look at O’Connor again. “That depends,” she said firmly.

“Education? Grammar and diction?”

“Yes,” she said. “Those things.”

“Manners?”

“Sure, but-”

“Voice?”

She gave him a glare. “Within certain limits. If you had an irritating way of speaking that wasn’t the product of a handicap or something, it probably would be legal not to hire you.”

“And if you have a soft, musical voice that men find pleasant, it would be legal to consider that an asset, wouldn’t it? Surely when you went in front of a judge and jury you used that voice.”

“This isn’t about me.”

“Of course it is,” Parish insisted. “What about your eyes and your hair? Your complexion?” He smiled. “Your figure?” He seemed to know she was about to interrupt, so he dropped the smile and spoke more quickly and seriously. “Suppose your company did a study to find out a jury’s reactions to a group of lawyers. I’ve heard there are companies that do that kind of research.”

“There are,” she said tersely.

“Well, suppose they did one and found that a jury’s reaction to an attractive woman was more positive than their reaction to an ugly one. Wouldn’t the company be foolish not to hire her and use her in difficult cases?”

“Why are you trying to make me angry? Do you think I’ll fall apart if I’m not?”

“No,” said Parish. “I’m just curious to know what you’re thinking. It’s important to me that I understand you.”

Marcia’s heart gave an odd little flutter at that, and she cursed herself for it.

But he went on. “You are extremely attractive.”

She rolled her eyes and let a breath out through her teeth. “Please.”

“I’m not trying to insult you,” he said. “It’s an advantage-an enormous one-and you’ve shown me that you’re aware of it, at least in certain circumstances. If you can confuse a person at lunch, you can get a client to hire you. You can charm a jury, make a judge want to help you. It would seem to me that it’s a gift, like being born intelligent or healthy or strong. In fact, beauty-sexual attractiveness-is made of those qualities.”

“What’s your point?”

“You have these advantages, but you complain. It would seem more sensible for someone to complain who had been deprived of them.”

Marcia’s eyes narrowed. “If I succeeded, people would think I batted my eyes at a judge. If I was promoted, people would think I slept my way to the next level, or just that my boss hoped I would be grateful for the favor. No matter what I did or didn’t do, I could never get credit for earning it with my work. Is that fair?”

“That’s a false question,” Parish said. “It’s probably possible to figure out which lawyer won a case, even if her side consisted of a team of three or four. But it’s not possible, even for her, to determine exactly how she won: what proportion of her victory was caused by the cold logic of her presentation, what proportion by how appealing she looked while she was giving it. In every instance, it was both.” He paused. “The only place where fairness comes in is whether she-a person-gets rewarded for using what she had to win.”

“But part of the reward should be the respect. You shouldn’t win and then have people feel contempt for you.”

“People don’t feel contempt in that situation. The only negative feeling is jealousy,” he assured her. “The women feel you don’t deserve to have what you’ve been given. The men see that you have powerful magic that’s not available to them.”

“I earned what I have.”

He looked at her, his expression intrigued, but said nothing to contradict her. His eyes refocused, and she knew he was studying Mary O’Connor again. At first Marcia was relieved. But after a time, she realized her irritation would not let her leave the subject. She needed to deliver a rebuttal.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll tell you why it was unfair. I was interviewed by the senior partners, and they asked difficult questions. I was hired, and was given no special privileges that I know of. I worked for three years, as hard as anyone. By then I thought I had become an important part of the team, a member of a group that valued me because I knew some things that the others didn’t, had experience that was different from theirs, was willing to devote as much effort as anyone did to succeed on a case. It was a shock to learn otherwise. It was a sudden dose of reality that I’d never had before. And do you know what? When the time came, my reaction wasn’t ‘They have it wrong.’ It was ‘Of course.’ It had never happened before, but it felt familiar, as though it had happened a hundred times. I’m bitter, but what I’m bitter about isn’t the world we live in. It’s the loss of the brighter, better, fairer world I imagined and lived in before.”

“What did you learn about the real world?”

“It’s a hard, harsh place.”

“Why?”

“You have to study as hard as I did and work the same hours, but you also have to work to be attractive. And you can’t decline to use it: all you can be is pretty or ugly, not somebody who refuses to be either. And you have to be very calculating about everything you do, including sex. You have to make self-serving decisions about who you will sleep with, but also who you won’t sleep with. And you have to be very careful never to let them know that ‘no’ is permanent, that you won’t ever sleep with them, because then they’ll stop pleasing you and begin to punish you. And…” She let her voice trail off.