Brenda Janowitz - Jack With a Twist

“Yes,” I say, practically ducking down under my desk as I see Noah walking by my office door with one of the other partners.

“You do realize that your fiancé is now the lead on all Healthy Foods matters, right?” she says.

“Which is exactly why he’ll let the billing go though,” I explain, “Now type.”

“Can you get disbarred for billing personal stuff to a client?” Vanessa asks.

“No!” I say. Yes. In fact, that’s the main reason why most attorneys get disbarred. But that shouldn’t really stop two women on a mission, should it? And anyway, this research is important. “They won’t mind at all. And they really do charge way too much for their coffee. I just went to a Healthy Foods the other day and my cappuccino was almost five bucks. The least they can do is help me out with this teensy tiny little issue.”

“What am I searching for here?” Vanessa asks. I can hear her beginning to type.

“Try typing in ethics and wedding dress, ” I say. “And put wedding dress in quote marks so that you search for the full term, not the two words separately.”

“You don’t have to tell me how to do a Lexis search, thank you very much,” Vanessa says.

“Well,” I say, “I did have to tell you what to type in.”

“That’s because what you want me to type in is crazy,” she explains. “You want me to find a case where the court holds that it’s not a breach of your ethical duties to have a wedding dress designer create your wedding dress for you when you’re representing her in a dissolution of partnership action.”

“Exactly!”

“Every lawyer knows that you can never find a case that matches your exact case perfectly,” Vanessa says, speaking to me as if I were a small child. Or a first-year law student.

“When you wanted me to research whether or not ‘randomly kissing some sleazy skank’ counted as a grounds for divorce,” I ask, “did I tell you that was crazy?”

Vanessa doesn’t respond, but I do hear the frantic tapping of keyboard keys over the phone.

“I’ve got something on a lawyer stealing money from a wedding dress designer’s escrow funds?” she says, still typing away.

“Nope,” I say. “I don’t want her money, just her dress.”

“How about this one—Southern District of California. Woman sues her wedding dress designer, who promised that she’d design a custom gown, on the grounds that the dress the designer created for her was not actually unique. Seems after this designer created the custom gown for this customer, the designer then began mass-producing the dress. Someone wore the same dress to the wedding that the bride wore herself.”

“Oh, my God, I’d be so pissed!” I say. “And who wears white to a wedding? If you see anyone show up to my wedding in white, please kick them out.”

“The designer had mass-produced the dress in forest green,” Vanessa says. “So, the guest showed up in the same dress as the bride, only hers was green.”

“If that happens to me, please still kick them out,” I say.

“I’m not really finding any cases that are on point for you, Brooke. Sorry.”

“Well, keep looking,” I say, as I open a window on my computer to begin a search on Westlaw. I hang up just as Vanessa’s saying something about having other work to do and I do, too, to be sure, but clearly my work on “wedding dress law” trumps all of that.

As the partners stop by my office all afternoon to praise me for my good work and dedication to the firm, one by one, like a receiving line to the Queen, all I can think is: My wedding dress…

Is it inappropriate to start making a mental checklist of who I want to have in my bridal party when I’m sitting in a divorce attorney’s office with my best friend? I mean, I can still be supportive of her and her divorce even while I’m thinking about my own wedding, right? No laws against that?

Okay, okay, so maybe it’s a tiny bit self-centered of me to be thinking about my wedding party while Vanessa laments the end of her own marriage, but I’m going to ask her to be my matron of honor, and that should probably cheer her up! Although, she’ll be divorced by the time I get married, so I guess that would make her the maid of honor. Not like she’s an old maid or anything!

Perhaps I shouldn’t bring this up right now.

“Vanessa, Ms. Cohen is ready for you now,” the assistant says. Vanessa takes a deep breath as she stands up. I stand, too, and give her a big hug.

It’s been hard for Vanessa to come to grips with the fact that her marriage is ending—I mean, obviously it would be hard for anyone to go through a divorce, but Vanessa has the added pressure of little to no support from her mother and the rest of her family, in general. They all seem to think that Marcus is the second coming of Christ, despite the fact that he kissed another woman while they were married. Well, he is tall and slim like Jesus, and ridiculously handsome and rather ethereal-looking, so, if it’s true that Jesus was actually black, they may have a decent argument.

But then there’s that whole kissing-another-woman thing. I’m pretty sure that those people who wear those WWJD bracelets—What Would Jesus Do?—would categorically tell you that the one thing that Jesus would not do is kiss another woman while married to Vanessa. It was just that one woman that one night, but still, it broke Vanessa’s heart and she still hasn’t fully recovered. Not long after she and Marcus separated, I went to dinner with Vanessa and her mother, and her mother repeatedly advised her to “get over yourself and go save your marriage.”

My mother couldn’t understand why Vanessa was getting a divorce either:

“How could you divorce a doctor?” my mom said to Vanessa on one of our wedding gown shopping expeditions. “Clearly, you are not Jewish. A Jewish woman would never divorce a doctor.”

“Being married to a doctor isn’t all you’d think it would be, Mrs. Miller,” Vanessa said. “Being married to a doctor has its disadvantages.”

“Like, for example,” I said, “anytime you’re in a crowded place and someone screams, ‘Is there a doctor in the house?’ he has to say ‘yes.’”

See how good I am at defusing a difficult topic and changing the subject? I don’t want to brag, but in addition to being a big-time lawyer, I also have an undergraduate degree in child psychology.

Oh, please. As if you don’t employ the same skills in dealing with your mother as you do in dealing with a small child.

“Well, there’s that,” Vanessa said, “but I meant more like the fact that he’s never home. He’s never there.”

“Well, yeah,” I said, “and the whole doctor-in-the-house thing.”

So, Vanessa’s really going through with the divorce. And now the only person she can depend on is me.

“You can do this,” I say and Vanessa nods unconvincingly back. “Want me to come in with you?”

“No,” she says quietly, “I think I have to do this part on my own.”

“Well, I’ll be sitting right here,” I say. “So just let me know if you need me.”

“Okay.” Vanessa squeezes my hand and I watch her as she walks into her attorney’s office.

Should I have insisted that I go in there? Vanessa’s been my best friend since our first year of law school and I hate that she’s going through something so painful right now. I should have just insisted that I go in with her. I consider for a second whether I should just walk back there and insist on sitting in on Vanessa’s meeting. But having your best friend bum-rush your first visit to your divorce attorney probably doesn’t set the best tone for an attorney-client relationship, so I opt to stay out in the reception area, like Vanessa’s asked me to.