The House Girl Read online

  2004

  WEDNESDAY

  The brief was not finished. Lina Sparrow, first-year litigation associate, took another sip of cold coffee. Her eyes flipped from her computer screen to the digital clock glowing red on the wall: 11:58 P.M. Get it to me Wednesday, Dan had said. Counting on you to work your usual magic. Never had Lina been late before, never, and yet here she sat, the last two minutes of Wednesday dangling just out of reach, her office a cave of paper and tented textbooks, the cursor blinking relentlessly on her screen. The brief: 85 pages, 124 perfect citations, the product of 92 frenetic hours billed over five ridiculous days, a document that would go to the judge, be entered into the official court record, be e-mailed to dozens of lawyers, to the client, to the opposing side. But was it good?

  Lina’s shoes were off—she always wrote barefoot—and as she stretched her toes, she wondered what precisely was her problem. Last year she had graduated at the top of her law school class, and she was now the highest-billing first-year associate at Clifton & Harp LLP, the preferred legal services provider for Fortune 100 companies and individuals of dizzying wealth. Lina had heard of other people’s performance issues—time management, crises of confidence, exhaustion, depression, collapse—but never, in three successful years of law school and nine prolific months at Clifton, had she frozen like this. She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands and blinked fast. Her office vibrated in the cold fluorescent glare: beige walls, gray carpet, white particleboard shelving units of the kind found in college dorm rooms, office buildings, prisons. On her second day at the firm, Lina had arranged a careful selection of personal items: on her wall, the law degree and one of her father’s smaller paintings; on her desk, the glass snow globe of a pre-9/11 Manhattan skyline and the photo of her parents circa 1982, both with longish hair and secret smiles. Each item represented a unique stamp on the exchangeable, impersonal nature of this space. I am here, the snow globe said. This is mine.

  Lina picked up the snow globe now and shook it. Fake granular flurries settled over the city and she repeated the question again and again: Was the brief good? Was the brief good? Was it? Silently the clock shifted to 11:59. And as the deadline slipped away, Lina felt a rush like skiing, or eating sugar straight, or that icy morning a taxi had careened toward her as she’d waited on the corner of Fifty-first and Fifth and watched helpless, immobile, infused with a wondrous dread as it spun out inches from the curb. An intoxicating, brief adrenaline. 12:00. What was she waiting for? Resolution? Inspiration? The brief said exactly what it had to say: our client wants money and the law says give it to him.

  Lina bent her neck hard to the left and heard her spine crack. She slipped her feet back into her high heels. Somewhere down the hall, the night cleaner’s vacuum whined with the insistence of a mosquito. Of course the brief was good. Weren’t her briefs always good? Wasn’t this, the law, what she did? And she did it very, very well. Lina typed a signature line and beneath it: Submitted by, Daniel J. Oliphant III, Partner, Clifton & Harp LLP.

  The strip lights burned and keyboards purred as Lina hurried the brief down the hall to Dan’s office. Past the heads of the night-shift secretaries floating above the workspace partitions. Past a blinking, malfunctioning copier that sat abandoned, its various doors and flaps left open, awaiting the arrival of some jumpsuited Joe versed in the fixing of mechanical things. Past the coffee station, with its stinky microwave and humming soda machine. Past the row of half-open office doors through which Lina sensed more than saw caffeine-strung associates staring at computer screens or listening on mute to meetings under way in Hong Kong or Houston or Dubai.

  At the corner office, Lina stopped.

  “Dan?” She rapped a knuckle on the half-cracked door and pushed it open.

  Dan sat marooned behind the island of his desk, his face glowing bluely from the computer screen. Floor-to-ceiling windows shimmered behind him, dark as a night sea. He was typing. His eyes shifted from the screen as Lina entered the room but his fingers remained in motion.

  Dan was Lina’s “mentor partner,” a designation handed down by the HR department on Lina’s first day at the firm. Lina had heard of him, of course. In the litigation world, Dan was a star. His perfect win record and lack of any obvious social anxiety issues distinguished him from the hordes of aggressively successful litigation partners at Clifton and throughout the city. A photo of two red-haired, pink-cheeked children sat framed in silver on Dan’s desk. Lily and Oliver, Dan had told her. Twins. Lina had never met them, nor the wife (Marion) whose photograph hung behind his desk (tan, wan smile, one-piece).

  “Sorry the brief is late,” Lina said, checking her watch: 12:04. “I got a little carried away with the corporate veil discussion. These facts are just so strong. But here it is.”

  Dan blinked. With both hands he pushed away his prodigious hair: red, springy, tending to vertical. Some partners cultivated symbols of eccentricity like this, flares sent up from the Island of Same. One wore glasses with thick black plastic frames reminiscent of a Cold War Kissinger. Another practiced meditation in his office every afternoon promptly at four o’clock, the oms echoing down the hall.

  “Brief?” Dan asked. “What brief?”

  “The brief in the fraud trial?” Lina spoke carefully. Dan often feigned an attitude of happy indifference. He gave the illusion of a laid-back, generally affable person, a person who might, with a smile, service your car and charge you a fair rate or sit on a barstool and buy you a beer. But she had seen him take his blood pressure meds (a colorful assortment, one the size of a horse vitamin), she had seen the throbbing blue vein at his neck. She’d once heard him scream at a paralegal who’d stapled a document in the wrong corner.

  Dan paused, then blinked again, faster this time. “Oh, yeah. Thanks, Lina. I remember—the brief. You’re a little late.” He glanced down at his watch (gold, glistening). “Throw it here on my desk.” He pointed his chin vaguely toward the left. “So how did it come out?”

  Lina hesitated, remembering those frozen moments in her office, her sense that something remained incomplete, undiscovered. But here, standing on Dan’s expansive carpet, breathing the vaguely fragranced air (mint? licorice?) that seemed to permeate only the partners’ offices, she pushed away any hint of uncertainty. “I’m very happy with it,” she said. “The argument is persuasive. And I’m confident we’ve covered all the relevant case law.”

  “I’m sure it’s great—your work always is.” Dan paused, and then half-whispered, “You know, I probably shouldn’t be telling you before the others, but we settled yesterday.”

  “Settled? Yesterday?” A coolness ran through Lina, starting at her eyebrows and ending at her toes, as though something warm and alive were departing her body.

  “The client’s been working on a deal for weeks. They signed the papers last night.” Dan beamed. No trial, no possibility of defeat. The perfect win record, still intact.

  “What about …?” and Lina circled her hand in the air to indicate the brief she had just completed, the twelve sets of exhibit files copied and bound, the witnesses flown in from L.A. and London, the thirty-odd people working feverishly upstairs, their eyes red, their vacations canceled, their carpals tunneled. What about all of that?

  “Yeah, I’ll go up soon to share the good news. Got some stuff to finish off down here first.” Dan examined a hangnail. “You know, it’s always a good idea to wait until the ink is dry before you pull the plug.”

  “But our position was so strong.” Lina shifted in place, tucked a restless lick of dark hair behind one ear. “So how much was the settlement?”

  “Two-fifty.” Dan lowered his gaze to the floor as he said this.

  “Two-fifty! Jesus, Dan, that won’t even cover the legal fees. We were right. We would have won.”

  Dan paused, tilted his head, and in the brief silence Lina read his disapproval, not of the settlement figure but of her outburst, her indignation. Rash. Unprofessional. She gave a chastised little nod.
/>   “Probably we would have won,” Dan said. “But you know, litigation is messy. It takes a long time. The client just didn’t have the stomach for it. They’re happy, Lina. They’re satisfied.” He exhaled long and low. “Look, this is what happens. I know, it’s tough. You get caught up in a case, you want to go in there and win. But remember, the client calls the shots. We do their bidding. This isn’t about us, it isn’t about emotion or any sort of absolute … justice, or whatever you want to call it. At the end of the day it’s about the client’s best interest. What does the client want? What’s best for their bottom line?”

  As Dan spoke, Lina’s gaze shifted to the darkened glass of his monstrous windows. Her own image reflected back: her blouse flared white, her hair a dark helmet, her face cast in shadow, the features indistinct, her body truncated and shorter (surely) than she actually was. And something in the position of her head, or the way the image seemed poised, hovering, disconnected from any solid ground, reminded Lina of the photo of her mother that sat beside her bed at home: Grace Janney Sparrow, dead when Lina was four, standing with bare arms and a forced smile on the steps of the house where Lina and her father still lived. In that photo, Lina’s mother was square-shouldered, cock-kneed, paused, waiting—Lina had always wondered, what was she waiting for?—in just the way Lina was standing now.

  Lina straightened, shifted in place, and her mother’s image vanished. She shrugged her shoulders, settled her face to impassive—the look she so often admired on Dan, of calm reason, of dignified remove.

  “Of course, the client’s best interest. I’m glad they’re happy. A settlement. That’s great.”

  Dan nodded with gravity, with finality. Lesson imparted, lesson learned.

  “And Lina,” Dan said. “Glad you stopped by. There’s something I want to talk to you about. A new case, something I think you’ll like.”

  Instantly, the fraud trial and its beleaguered brief receded from Lina’s mind. She needed a new case. There were so many hours in a day, all of them billable to a client, some client, any client. Lina allocated her time in six-minute intervals via a computerized clock that ticked away in the lower left-hand corner of her computer screen, silently reeling off the workday minutes in pie wedges of bright yellow. Another six minutes gone, and another wedge of that small clock flashed. At Clifton, time was an end in itself, the accomplishment of a task not nearly as important as the accurate recording of the minutes consumed by its execution. Lina felt sometimes, with an increasing frequency, that the clock existed inside her, all day, every day, the ticking away of minutes embedded in her brain, pulsing through her bloodstream. The idea of falling behind in her billables filled her with an amorphous dread.

  “A new case sounds great,” Lina said, and watched without one flicker of an eyelash as Dan picked up her brief and lobbed it into the trash.

  “It’s an unusual matter,” Dan said. “We’re taking it on for a big client. Important client. Keep him happy, you know. He’s been threatening to take his business elsewhere so we’re going the extra mile. We’ll talk specifics tomorrow. But it’s big. Historic. Controversial. What do you think about slavery?”

  “Slavery? What do I think about it?”

  “Yeah. First thoughts. First words.”

  “Bad. Civil War … umm, not good …” As she floundered, an image of Meredith, the six-foot blond litigation associate rumored to be dating a Yankees outfielder, danced through Lina’s tired brain. Meredith sat ramrod straight in meetings; she spoke articulately, rationally, with apparent interest and keen insight, about credit default swaps, about sushi. Lina saw her as a nemesis of sorts, an otherworldly being who provoked Lina’s competitive streak as well as her annoyance (Meredith frequently forgot Lina’s name). Surely Meredith would have had some pithy, intellectual remarks on slavery. Even at one A.M.

  Dan leaned forward in his chair. “And Lina, this case could be big for you. You’re young, ambitious. This one has potential. Big potential. You may not know this, but we start associates on partner track pretty early around here.” Dan raised his eyebrows. “And you are just the kind of person we’d like to encourage.”

  “Partner track?” The words pushed a button of delight within Lina’s chest. “I won’t let you down.”

  “Okay then. Tomorrow I’ll reassign your caseload. You’ll be full-time on the new matter. Now go home!” Dan looked at her and smiled, beatific as Santa Claus.

  ONE OF THE FIRM’S CARS ferried Lina to Brooklyn, a silent silver Lexus, the driver fast and efficient down the expansive uncluttered avenues. The Midtown sidewalks were clear, the streets streamed with empty taxis. It struck Lina suddenly that this was the middle of the night. Even here, in the city that never slept, most people now were sleeping. Law firm time was like casino time, only instead of an endless darkened cocktail hour it was always a neon-bright afternoon. The dead center of the workday, all night long.

  The car sped onto the Brooklyn Bridge, the river below like the sky above, shimmering constellations of boats and buoys and Lina in the middle, floating within the layers of light. Tonight’s driver was a regular—a massive Russian with a shaved head and meaty knuckles. Igor, Lina vaguely remembered, was his name, an astrophysics professor before he immigrated west. Igor drove solidly, not too fast, and Lina relaxed against the plush interior of the backseat, the day’s stress leaving her in steady increments measured by the distance traveled toward home.

  Lina and her father, the artist Oscar Sparrow, lived in a Park Slope brownstone of the kind intensely coveted by a certain type of two-salary New York family. Four stories, a steep stoop, a brief weedy garden out back. The house had one functional (though still smoky, even after the cleaning) fireplace, two kitchens (first floor, fourth floor), three art studios (first, second, fourth), one walk-in closet (Oscar’s), one claw-foot tub (Lina’s). An ageless red oak rose mastlike from the backyard and in the front, nestled within a square of dirt cut from the concrete, grew a linden, the two trees roughly the same height as the brownstone. As a child, Lina often thought of the trees’ roots intermingling beneath the floor of their house, holding herself and Oscar aloft in a living webbed cradle. In a strong wind, when the trees creaked and their branches scratched against the windows, she imagined that the house rocked within its root bed and the motion soothed her like a lullaby.

  Oscar had bought the place decades earlier, when Park Slope was home primarily to drug dealers and poor lefty optimists. Throughout Lina’s childhood and adolescence, his finances had seemed always to tilt toward ruin, and he had struggled to cover the mortgage payments. The obvious solution, one that they never discussed, was to rent out a bedroom, some studio space, maybe even the top two floors, themselves a spacious self-contained apartment. But they never did. Somehow—a painting sold, a teaching gig, some carpentry work—Oscar managed. Lina had started waitressing at fourteen, contributing what she could to keep the phone connected and the electricity on, and took over management of the family finances at fifteen, trying in vain to keep Oscar on a strict budget for paint, canvas, brushes, charcoal, and the various oddities (dusty taxidermy, amateur mosaics) he toted home from flea markets and tag sales. Lina questioned Oscar mercilessly about these purchases, cooking only cheap beans and rice for days afterward, but she never pushed him on the tenant question. Lina had spent her entire life here, through elementary and high school, then as an undergrad and law student at NYU. She too wanted the house all to themselves. She couldn’t bear the thought of sharing with tenants. This was where her mother had once slept, cooked, painted, breathed, and Lina’s memories of her seemed tethered to the physical space. The way a wall curved away, a washboard of light thrown by the sun against the bare floor, the sharp clap of a kitchen drawer slamming shut—all these evoked flashes of her mother and early childhood that seemed cast in butter, soft and dreamy, lovely, rich.

  Lina held close a handful of these flashes: an image of dark hair falling down a pale back, like a curtain or screen. A smell of pepper and sug
ar. A quiet, secret laugh. A song with no discernible words and no recognizable tune, a hummed series of notes. Da da dum da, da da dum da. And a pervasive sense of contentment, of being cared for and watched over, as light played upon a yellow-painted wall, as a toy train sat in her dimpled hand. Were these memories? Or memories of memories? Or of what she desired to remember?

  Lina let herself in through the heavy front door, the cold tiled entryway leading to tall double doors, each set with a narrow glass panel etched in curling lines and flowers. She clicked on the tall floor lamp and the living room was thrown into soft illumination. Above a long couch of cracked black leather hung Oscar’s portrait of a six-year-old Lina: bright acrylics, Lina’s hair in braids, her eyes astonished, in her hands a leggy green frog, one of several Oscar used to keep in the downstairs bathroom. Another, smaller portrait hung beside it: a dusky-hued oil painting of a dark-haired, moss-eyed young woman standing in front of an easel, paintbrush in hand, her body half-turned toward the viewer, no smile but her tidy, pretty features beaming with ease. This was Grace, Lina’s mother, painted the year before Lina was born.

  “Carolina, string bean-a, are you home?” Oscar yelled, using his favorite nickname for her, one Lina had forbidden him from uttering within earshot of any human being other than herself. But she secretly liked that he called her by her full name—Carolina. He was the only person she permitted to use the name, primarily because the Spanish-sounding pronunciation (ee in the penultimate syllable) always brought on too many questions about her background, and how was she to answer? Where had the name come from? She had no idea. Your mother chose it was all Oscar had ever told her.

  Oscar appeared in the hall, his hair askew, a gash of red paint down one cheek. The late hour had no apparent effect on him, though Lina knew he’d been in the studio since seven o’clock that morning, working on pieces for his new show. He launched himself toward her, all six feet of him, enfolding Lina in a boisterous bear hug of the kind he delivered regularly. Physicality was part of his charisma—and he was charismatic, people often told Lina this—but there was something too in his large, clear blue eyes, a spotlight kind of interest in which people of all sorts—friends, colleagues, critics, women—would bask. Oscar had frazzled dark hair, thinning now into a sharp widow’s peak, that matched his scrap of frazzled dark beard. Recently he’d been prescribed glasses, half-frame bifocals made of tortoiseshell plastic that he did not like to use for reasons having to do with vanity and age.