Brenda Janowitz - Scot on the Rocks

“Brooke Miller,” I said, trying to sound sweet and professional, like the kind of woman a man would most definitely want to get back together with and take to her ex-boyfriend’s wedding.

“Hi, is this Brooke Miller?” a voice asked. I didn’t recognize it. I couldn’t believe I’d wasted a good “Brooke Miller” on a voice I didn’t recognize.

“Yes,” I said, already flipping my computer screen back on and checking my e-mail.

“My name is Jessica Shevitz Rauch and I do attorney placement. Do you have some time now to talk?”

It’s such a funny question to ask a litigator when she’s at work. Time to talk. A litigator never has time to talk unless it’s billable. Granted, I hadn’t done any billable work all day, but the point was that I did not, in fact, have time to talk to this woman. My nonbillable time today was being spent on plotting ways to get back my man and shopping online for outfits that would assist me in getting back said man.

And I love the term attorney placement. It’s as if they think that even though you’re smart enough to graduate law school, pass the New York bar and become an attorney, you won’t get the fact that they’re headhunters. Headhunters start calling attorneys at big firms the minute you walk in the door, offering promises of smaller firms with better hours and perfect in-house counsel positions at prestigious corporations. It’s good to know there are options, but more often than not the headhunters just want to move you to some other big firm and take their thirty-percent cut of your vastly overblown salary.

“Sorry, I don’t have the time,” I said, picking up a nail file from my desk and fixing a crack in my thumbnail.

“Maybe some other time?” she asked. “Let me ask you, are you still happy at Gilson Hecht?”

“Yes,” I said, “for now I am. But, I suppose you can always hold on to my number. Thanks for calling.”

I hung up the phone and realized that I filed my thumbnail into a strange hexagonal shape. Figuring that I had the rest of the evening to get some really good billable work done/get back my man, I dashed out to the nail place around the corner from my office.

Five o’clock — one manicure, pedicure and ten-minute mini-massage later — and Douglas’s secretary was still standing firm. I should never have encouraged him to get her such an expensive Christmas gift last year. If I’d let him give her the $10 Godiva truffles he wanted to give instead of insisting on the $100 facial gift certificate at Elizabeth Arden, I’d be talking to Douglas right now.

Tap, tap, tap.

Tap, tap, tap, splat! All over my best going out/getting back your man pants. Ugh. No wonder my dry cleaner wears a fur coat in the winter. It’s not what you’re thinking, though. It was one of those fancy desk pens. I think that they are, by their very nature, much more delicate than those regular pens.

Six o’clock and at last, I got a different story from the gate-keeper. Douglas was (finally!) not in another meeting. He had left for the day. I threw a Bic across my office, hitting the door. (It didn’t break. I told you so.)

One more nonbillable hour later, at 7:00 p.m., I decided to call him at home. That was it! I would leave him a sweet, sexy message saying that I forgave him, and suggest that to celebrate, we should go to California for Trip’s wedding. Perfect. I shut the door to my office and practiced what I would say to the answering machine.

I dialed the number — my old phone number — and waited for the answering machine to pick up. I knew that he wouldn’t be home since he usually met up with clients for drinks after work. He didn’t have a cell phone that I could call because he didn’t own one. Douglas considered using cell phones rude. Now, I can’t help but laugh — apparently for Douglas, speaking on a cell phone in public is rude, but sleeping with another woman when you’re living with someone else is, on the other hand, perfectly acceptable in polite society.

“Hello?” a female voice answered. Who the hell was picking up our telephone? Someone had broken into our apartment. I had to call the police! “Police, a cat burglar has broken into my old apartment, and is answering the phone!”

“Gilson Hecht?” the cat burglar asked into the phone. How did she know where I was calling from? My goodness, the burglar was psychic! “Police, a psychic cat burglar has broken into my old apartment!”

Using my superlitigator powers of deduction, I soon realized that the firm’s name and number must have come up on caller ID. I quickly hung up the phone as Beryl was still saying “Hello? Hello?” (Yes, my super litigator skills told me that, too.)

Beryl. Is that woman using my phone? The very phone I bought for Douglas? Well, didn’t exactly buy for him, but the phone I totally used when I lived there! Has she moved in already? God, that man moves fast! He and I at least waited a month!

By 7:30 p.m., I had plan B in effect: I would reconvene a special court session at our local watering hole to discuss the matter further and figure out a plan C. Yes, plan B consisted solely of gathering the troops — Vanessa and Jack — but give me a break! I was under a lot of stress here!

After picking Vanessa up at her office, we sneaked down the back stairwell so as to avoid any partners who might catch us leaving before we had actually collapsed from exhaustion. We got to the gym at Public School 142 just in time to slip in for the last few minutes of the firm intramural basketball game against the lawyers from Arby Schweitzer.

The bleachers were completely empty, so Vanessa and I took front-row seats. The gym floor was scattered with briefcases and Redwelds full of documents with a row of BlackBerries lined up perfectly on the front-row bench. Jack’s BlackBerry stood out in the crowd since one of his nieces had decorated it with Strawberry Shortcake stickers so that he would never lose it.

Vanessa sat down on the bleachers quietly and tucked her bag underneath her legs. I, on the other hand, sat down and knocked over the entire row of BlackBerries, which fell tumbling to the gymnasium floor like a set of very expensive dominoes. None of the Gilson Hecht associates seemed to care, since our firm pays for its unfettered 24/7 access to its associates, but judging from the looks on the Arby Schweitzer team’s faces, I got the feeling that their firm did not. As I crawled on the floor picking them up as subtly as I could, I saw Jack give me a tiny smile and a slight wave. He was wearing a Gilson Hecht T-shirt with a long sleeve T-shirt underneath and had the sleeves pushed all the way up to his elbows. Jack had a million freckles covering his arms, but barely any on his face.

The score was tied and there were just a few minutes left on the clock. I puzzled over Jack’s choice of crunch-time lineup: rounding out his usual starters (the two other attorneys in our department who were over six feet tall), he had Billie Cooper, a fourth-year corporate associate and Bob Frohman, a second-year tax associate, on the court.

While Billie Cooper was the tallest girl in the entire corporate department standing at five foot nine, I knew that she frequented the nail place around the corner from our office almost as often as I did. Now, I’m no basketball player, but I’m pretty sure that you need to use your hands to do it. Although I did meet Michael Jordan once and he had lovely hands. But, I digress.

Bob Frohman from tax was so timid, I could swear that I’d never actually heard him speak. And I had a sneaking suspicion that half of the tax department hadn’t, either. At five foot four, even Billie was taller than him. When I would pass him in the hallways at work, he always looked as if he was terrified of his own shadow. At a large law firm, that sort of thing could be considered normal what with how stressful the work is, but Bob looked that way all the time. I once saw him at another tax associate’s birthday party and there he stood, in a corner all night, looking downright scared, speaking to no one the entire time. I imagined that if you ever did speak to him, no sound would come out of his mouth. Or, if it did, he would have nothing else to discuss but the Internal Revenue Code. I could not, for the life of me, figure out why Jack had put him in the game at such a crucial moment.