Brenda Janowitz: Scot on the Rocks

“It’s not like I’m obsessed with him, or anything,” I explained. I didn’t want Jack to worry about me. Or see how pathetic I was being. Jack had broken off an engagement six months prior and he never became completely unhinged about it the way I was over Douglas. In fact, six months later, he seemed totally fine about it. Well, I mean, I’m sure he was upset at the time — I’m not meaning to say he’s cold or some sort of monster or anything. It’s just that he didn’t seem to have to discuss it constantly with his friends in the ensuing days. Although maybe that’s what they did at all of those firm intramural basketball games. Jack was the captain of our firm’s team, so maybe that’s what they did while reviewing the playbook, lament past relationships and cry over it the way we women would, quoting Oprah and trying to figure out where it all went wrong. In between shooting hoops, I mean.

Or maybe Jack was able to recover so quickly because he had been engaged to his fiancée for three and a half years without ever having set a wedding date. I always thought that it was totally ironic that in Jack’s junior year, he played the Nathan Detroit role in his high school’s production of Guys and Dolls. I was sure his fiancée didn’t find that fun fact quite as charming.

“I’m not obsessed with Douglas,” I said. “I can move on…. To obsessing about Trip’s wedding instead. Totally different.”

“Totally more healthy,” Vanessa said, with her hands in her desk drawers, getting out sugars and various other fake sweeteners for us to put in our coffees.

“If you want to be healthy,” Jack said in his best game-show announcer voice, “drink coffee from Healthy Foods. Wholesome, delicious, and also,” he continued, segueing into his normal speaking voice, “our firm’s biggest new client.”

“And the bane of Jack’s existence,” Vanessa said. Healthy Foods was, in fact, the firm’s biggest new client, having just been sued in a sixty-million dollar false advertising class action lawsuit claiming that Healthy Foods coffee was not, in fact, healthy, as the name might suggest. The firm now stocked Healthy Foods brand coffee in all of its kitchens and, of course, in the twelfth-floor cafeteria. Jack, up for partner in six months, was put on the case, since the powers-that-be knew that he would do anything for the firm in a year that the firm was voting on his partnership. As per our usual assignment, I was the junior associate on the matter. I didn’t know if Healthy Foods coffee was healthy or not, but it was pretty darn good either way. Especially when someone hand delivered it right into my hot little hands. Then it was tasty and convenient.

Jack was always doing sweet things like that. Last June, Jack and I were supposed to take summer associates out to lunch to our favorite midtown restaurant. With my feet practically out the door, I was called into a meeting and was unable to attend the lunch. I sat in my meeting pouting for upward of two hours, all the while fantasizing about the delicious time Jack and the summers were having without me. When I got back to my office, as if on cue, Jack swept in with a doggy bag — my favorite chocolate dessert from said favorite restaurant. We could barely see each other across my desk because the files on it were piled up so high, but even through the haze of discovery documents, Jack could see me smiling from ear to ear.

It’s hard to believe that I only met Jack when I came to the firm as a summer associate myself a few years ago. I feel as if I’ve known him forever. There I was, the summer after my second year of law school: one of the elite few walking the halls of Gilson, Hecht and Trattner, one of New York City’s largest and most prestigious law firms. Okay, so it wasn’t really an elite few since the firm boasts over four hundred attorneys in its New York City office alone, over six hundred worldwide, but you get the general point I’m trying to make. I was one of the elite four hundred some odd people walking those halls.

With a twenty-four-hour command center including a word-processing center, mailroom, cafeteria and supply room (not supply closet, mind you, an actual room dedicated solely to the mission of ordering and giving associates whatever supplies their hearts desired), the twelfth floor should have its own postal code. It even has a cash machine. There is a staff of eight whose sole responsibility is to send and receive faxes (all of which makes it even more shocking when your faxes are actually not sent or lost entirely). When you’re a summer associate, you think that these facts are very cool and glamorous. You don’t seem to realize that if the firm has the capacity to run twenty-four hours a day, that the associates, likewise, are expected to have the capacity to run those same twenty-four hours a day.

Which, incidentally, explains why I didn’t know that my ex-boyfriend was dating one of the most famous movie stars in the world. I’ve been doing a motion for summary judgment for the last six months. I won’t bore you with the details of what a motion for summary judgment entails — suffice it to say, a motion for summary judgment means fourteen-to sixteen-hour days, six to seven days a week. Sleep is a luxury that even on our six-figure big-time lawyer salaries, we cannot afford. Wow, didn’t that sound, like, totally dramatic?

Can that also be my excuse for why I didn’t realize that my boyfriend was cheating on me? Okay, yes, that’s good. Remind me to tell my mother/best friend/boss/therapist that later. And since you’re so chummy with my grandmother, would you be a dear and tell her that very thing, too?

When I interview unsuspecting law students interested in coming to Gilson Hecht for the summer after their second year of law school, the question I am most often asked is “What is your favorite thing about Gilson Hecht?” I love being asked that question because it is the one point in the interview where I can just be myself and not deliver the firm’s party line about the training (so-so), the mentoring program (my partner-mentor got drunk the first time he took me for lunch), and the amount of experience junior associates get early on in their careers (is that what they call the fourteen-to sixteen-hour days?). Sometimes I fantasize about just telling them the truth — that the associates at Gilson Hecht seem to want to kill themselves ever-so-slightly less than the associates at most other major New York City law firms. And that’s saying a lot. But saying that sort of thing is very much discouraged in interviews.

The reason why the “favorite thing about Gilson Hecht” question is so easy for me to answer is that the best part of working at Gilson Hecht is, by far, the friends I have made here.

Jack was already a first-year associate at the firm when I started. I was in the self-serve photocopy room up on the eighth floor, having a total Nine to Five moment — paper flying every which way — clueless as to what I should do to make the copy machine behave and stop simultaneously spewing out and chewing up paper, when Jack swept in and saved the day. And saved the memo I had been photocopying at the time.

“Consider me your knight in shining armor. Or khakis, as the case may be,” he said, introducing himself, baby-blue eyes gleaming. He’s been saving me ever since.

“You can stop obsessing about your ex-boyfriend’s wedding,” Jack declared. “Your problem is solved. I’ll go with you to the wedding.”

“Thanks, but I already told Trip about Douglas,” I explained, putting my head down into my coffee.

“And warned him that he’d be wearing a kilt,” Vanessa explained, finishing my thought for me.

“Yes, and told him that my date would be in a skirt,” I agreed.