Lawyer for the Dog Read online

  I pay her what she’s worth, which is a lot more than the usual secretary’s salary.

  I’ve encouraged her to go back to college, then law school. “You could take night courses,” I say. “It would take a while, but I’ll help you pay for it.”

  “What’s the point?” she says. “I love working for you.”

  “You’d still be working for me. You’d just be my associate, right?”

  “Right,” she says, in that voice that means she thinks this is just a pipe dream, not a realistic plan. I’ll wait about six months before I bring it up again.

  In addition to our clients and our now irregular and dwindling menses, Gina and I have in common our disappointments—maybe I should say disasters—in love. We’re different in so many ways, but over the years we’ve shared these disappointments, comforted and consoled each other. Gina has had two divorces and many more unsatisfactory relationships in between, the sheer number of which I attribute to her determination and eternal optimism. Gina perseveres. She paints her nails and colors her hair. She nurtures her sexuality as if it were a rare orchid.

  I, on the other hand, have almost quit trying. I say “almost” because every now and then I feel something that I recognize as sexual. It comes as a surprise, like an old dear friend showing up out of the blue, and I say to myself, “Ah, yes…” But it’s been a while.

  While I haven’t been as persistent as Gina, I’ve had my share of relationships, enough that I’ve long ago forgotten the complete list of lost loves, but here are the ones I remember:

  —The most recent: Ken Smythe, bankruptcy lawyer. I dated him for about six months. Things seemed to be going well—we were going out several times a week—but then he stopped calling and made lame excuses when I called him. I was hurt, but also relieved. His addiction to John Wayne movies (he had the complete collection) as well as his compulsive purchases of expensive boots (he had at least ten pairs) had begun to wear on me.

  —Randy McInnis, master carpenter. We had a yearlong romance beginning shortly after he installed new kitchen cabinets at my condo. He was a gorgeous man, blond all over and muscled from his work, but he drank too much and didn’t read anything more complicated than People magazine. When his response to his mother’s death was to “get drunk and screw,” I knew I’d had enough.

  —Franklin Robard, hotshot Chicago criminal lawyer. We met at a legal conference. He was a little too flashy for my taste—he drove a red Porsche—but smart as hell, with a great sense of humor. We carried on a terrifically exciting long-distance relationship for a while (expensive hotels, room service with champagne), and he tried to convince me to look for a job at a Chicago firm. “Or if you don’t want to work, that’s okay, too,” he said, and I tried to imagine myself as his wife until one night he mentioned that his marriage wasn’t “much of a marriage anymore.” He’d never actually lied to me. I’d just assumed he was single and available. But when I realized his “proposal” was that I move to Chicago to be his mistress, I punched him. He left that hotel room with a wad of tissues over his bloody nose.

  —And Joe Baynard, my first real love, with whom I had almost nothing in common other than a law degree. He was Charleston blue blood, the son of a lawyer who was himself the son of a lawyer. I was upstate commonfolk. He went to law school because it was expected of him, I went because I felt a fire in my gut. I wanted to change the world. He was perfectly happy with it the way it was.

  So why did we fall in love? There was the physical attraction, but beyond that, I think we were actually attracted to each other because of our differences. He was generous with his friendship but not socially adventurous—except in his liaison with me. His law school friends were all from Charleston, people he’d grown up with. Around them he was charming and affable. I tended to be a loner, was opinionated and feisty. He could make me laugh; I could help him see beyond the narrow confines of his world. He mellowed me, helping me to see the other side of every argument, to think before I shot my mouth off. For a few years we were like two halves of one well-adjusted person: we came together, and we fit.

  After our wedding, we rented a renovated carriage house behind his aunt’s house on King Street, around the corner from his office at his father’s firm and within easy walking distance of the county courthouse, where I worked as a public defender. At night we’d come back to the apartment, cook dinner, drink wine, stay up late discussing our cases until we were too tired to talk anymore, then fall into bed and make love. On weekends we hung out with lawyer friends, men and women we’d gone to law school with, or drove up to Columbia to see my mother.

  But when I let him convince me to interview at his family firm, things changed very fast. Being a public defender wasn’t a career, he said, just a stepping stone. I still loved my work but the frustrations were mounting: the almost-hopeless cases, unpredictable trial schedule, low pay. “What have you got to lose?” he asked. “Most young lawyers would kill for the chance.” So I went for the interview. Of course it was already a done deal. His father showed me the office that was just waiting for a new associate: burnished antique desk, bookshelves already outfitted with the South Carolina Code of Laws, Persian rug. I must have showed some hesitation about the hunting scenes on the walls. “Of course the décor can be altered to your tastes,” he said. Joe’s uncle bragged about the firm’s “commitment toward diversity,” which I found odd given the total white-maleness of the twenty-five-member group, but I flattered myself that I would be a trailblazer.

  Within a month of my move to the firm, Joe started nagging. Couldn’t I be a little more “reserved” around the office, couldn’t I avoid talking politics? It’s fine, he said, that you want to stay involved in pro bono work, but do you have to take on three no-pay cases right off the bat? In turn, I attacked him for being too subservient to the senior partners—his father and his two uncles, those three bastions of the Charleston bar who inhaled entitlement with every breath and exhaled enough pomposity to fuel an army of aspiring young associates. Our sweet evenings devolved into petty feuding followed by long silences. “Maybe it’s time to buy a house,” he said. He wanted one downtown, of course. I wanted one on the beach. We were hardly having sex anymore, and I missed a few days of the pill. Still, the pregnancy was a surprise. I kept it a secret, denying even to myself that I might be pregnant, until the miscarriage. “We’ll try again,” said Joe, as if we’d been trying.

  My body healed soon enough, but I procrastinated about going back to work. Joe made excuses for me at the firm. Finally he confronted me: “You hate it, don’t you?” I nodded my head. “Then go back to the public defender.” I’d never heard him sound so angry.

  He was right: I hated the new job, but what I hated more was how I felt about us. Those differences that had once attracted us were now constant irritations. The next day, after he left for work, I found an apartment of my own. “It’s just a trial separation,” I said. Joe begged me to stay—that same “Please, Sally”—but I’d already made up my mind.

  Do I regret it? My best friend Ellen asked me that once and I snapped, “Of course not,” but the truth is, I’ll always wonder if I gave up too soon. My mother certainly thought so. “You had it all,” she said, “and you just threw it away.” And then, because I was too depressed to argue with her, she kept going: “I never told you this, Sally, but I was amazed that Joe was even attracted to someone like you.” Years later she apologized, but her attempts to be supportive about my single life were hurtful: “It will take an extraordinary man to want an independent woman like you.”

  In the year or two before Mom moved in with me I had a few blind dates arranged by well-meaning friends, occasions on which I realized within minutes of the first handshake that I wanted to go home, where I might rescue the evening with a glass of wine and a good novel. These men were usually divorced lawyers or doctors. We’d meet for dinner, a drink or two, and that would be it. My girlfriends eventually gave up their matchmaking.

  And now I hav
e my mother for a housemate. “Are you sure you aren’t just using her as an excuse?” asks my secretary Gina, and maybe she’s right.

  Gina never gives up on love: not for herself, and not for me. She is perpetually panning for a glimmer of gold. And so, when I return from family court after the hearing in Hart v. Hart and announce, with a mysterious smile, “I have a new client, and he’s really cute!” she springs to attention.

  “But I’ll tell you about him later,” I tease. “Right now I have to review the depositions for the Vogel trial.”

  “It’s been continued,” she says. “The clerk just called.”

  “What?”

  “Mr. Vogel’s in the hospital. Broken ankle. He’ll be okay, but it’ll be a couple of weeks.”

  “Damn,” I say, because we’ll have to notify a dozen witnesses, but I’m secretly pleased that the three days set aside for the trial are now restored to me. I can catch up on some work, maybe even take a day off.

  “So.” Gina follows me down the hall and into my office. “Tell me about the new client. How old?”

  “I’m not really sure, but not a puppy,” I say. I start going through the pile of messages on my desk, pretending to ignore her.

  “Look at me, Sally Baynard. I want details.”

  I laugh. “He’s really a dog.”

  “I thought you said he was cute.”

  “He’s cute, but he’s a dog. A miniature schnauzer.” And then I explain what my ex-husband has gotten me into.

  “You fall for his sweet talk every time,” Gina says.

  “I’m getting paid for this one, for a change. Guess I should start working on it. Betty’s copying the file, but that might take a while. Would you call her and get Mrs. Hart’s number, set up a time for me to see her—she’s got the dog—maybe sometime tomorrow. Want to go with me?”

  “No thanks. Now if it had been a man…”

  I sort through the stack of phone messages, all in Gina’s neat handwriting, dividing them into three piles: Priority, Can wait, Ignore.

  Priority: “Rick Silber. Going crazy.” Rick is a psychology professor at the College of Charleston. I represent him in his divorce. Did he say he was going crazy, or is this Gina’s interpretation? I can’t tell from the message.

  “Richard Silber,” he answers. He sounds congested.

  “Sally Baynard. You okay?”

  “I’m holding on, but this is hard to take.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “She’s got breast cancer.”

  “Who’s got breast cancer?” Is he talking about his wife, Debra, whom he’s divorcing, or his girlfriend the graduate student?

  “Debra.” He can hardly get the words out between sobs. “It’s the really bad kind.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “I want to drop the whole thing,” he says. “The divorce.”

  “Have you talked to her?”

  “Not yet.”

  “How did you find out?”

  “Our daughter called this morning. She blames it on me.” He blows his nose.

  “You can’t give someone breast cancer by filing for divorce.”

  “But how can I … how can I proceed with this, when she’s … God, I’m such an ass.”

  “Why don’t you come in tomorrow morning, we can talk it over?”

  “I teach tomorrow morning.”

  “What about this afternoon?”

  “Okay,” he agrees, “but I’m going to call her, tell her I’m dropping the whole thing.”

  “You can’t call her. There’s a restraining order.”

  “Can I send her some flowers or something?”

  “Don’t do anything until we talk, okay?” I looked at my watch. “What about four p.m.?”

  “Okay. Sally?”

  “Yes?”

  “You think I’m an ass?”

  Of course I can’t answer that honestly. “I think you’re upset and confused.”

  “But, I mean, you’re a feminist, aren’t you?”

  “I guess you could say that.”

  “So you must think I’m a real ass, running around with one of my grad students, although technically I could argue she’s not really a student because she’s been working on her dissertation for seven years—”

  “We can talk about all this later. Why don’t you write down a list of your concerns and questions, and we’ll try to address them one by one. Four o’clock.”

  * * *

  I open my office window, my free afternoon dissolving into the humid Charleston air. I find myself thinking about the dog. Does he have any idea what’s going on between Mr. and Mrs. Hart? Does he suffer? Maybe, but surely nothing like his owners, or like Rick Silber or any of my human clients. And surely nothing like me, the lawyer who listens to their stories, counsels them, soothes them, steers them through the labyrinth of the legal system, around the deep pits of their sorrows, who suffers their angry outbursts, offers a tissue for tears, celebrates their victories and shares their defeats; the lawyer who is—despite her wishful thinking to the contrary—very much like them. For better or worse.

  Beauregard’s Fancy

  You’d think we were headed toward some exotic destination—Bali or Tibet or Kenya—instead of Sullivan’s Island, just across the Cooper River from Charleston, but the minute my Toyota starts to climb, I feel the excitement: the arc of the bridge lifts me like a wish. Escape. I’m suspended in a realm of possibilities, no longer earthbound, almost flying.

  “We need a little adventure!” I say. My father used to say this all the time. He was always trying to transform the ordinary—a trip to the post office or the hardware store—into something remarkable. It was almost as if he knew his heart would give out too soon, that he’d have to make the best of the life he couldn’t escape, the humdrum job at the chamber of commerce, the marriage to a woman who wanted more than he could provide.

  “You hear that, Miz Margaret?” says Delores. My mother is terrified if I drive over thirty miles an hour so Delores keeps her company in the backseat. Mom hugs her stuffed chihuahua, which looks almost real except for the miniature sombrero attached to its head. I bought the dog at the hospital gift shop—I was dazed from lack of sleep—during her last bout with pneumonia. Now whenever we go anywhere in the car, the chihuahua rides with us. He used to sing and play a little plastic guitar, but the guitar fell off, and the battery, thankfully, ran down.

  From the top of the bridge we see a big cruise ship heading out through the harbor toward open water. “Look,” I say loud enough for my mother to hear, and point toward the ship, but she doesn’t seem interested.

  Delores, on the other hand, can’t take her eyes off the boat. “People got to be crazy to get on those things,” she says.

  “I have some friends who go on cruises all the time,” I say. “They tell me it’s very relaxing.” I’ve never been on a cruise, and it’s been twenty years since I took more than a few days of vacation.

  “If you want to relax,” says Delores, “all you need to do is go to Myrtle Beach.”

  Delores and her boyfriend Charlie go to Myrtle Beach for a week every August. They play miniature golf every morning, and every afternoon they take a dip in the shallow end of the motel pool. If it rains they stay inside and play gin rummy.

  Every night they go to a different restaurant, but they always order the same thing: seafood platters with slaw and hush puppies.

  I know all this because I once asked Delores how she managed to stay so happy with Charlie year after year. Delores is sixty, Charlie sixty-five. They’ve been a couple for twenty years. “’Cause we don’t shack up,” she explained. “The only time I let him spend the night is when we go to Myrtle Beach. Charlie and me, we have a lot of fun, but a week is about enough twenty-four-hour togetherness.”

  They go to Myrtle Beach because that’s where Charlie grew up, but they never venture onto the beach. “You know how it was back then,” she said, meaning when she was young, “no black pe
ople on the beach unless they was in uniform.”

  “But that was a long time ago,” I said.

  “I don’t like the sand in my shoes,” she said, with finality, “and I’m not swimming in filthy water with sharks and jellyfish.” So I’m surprised that Delores has agreed to spend a couple of hours on the beach this afternoon with my mother while I visit with Maryann Hart and my new canine client.

  It’s warm for November, almost balmy, and I ignore the thin ridge of dark clouds in the western sky. We’ve brought an old blanket, on top of which we unfold two plastic chairs. My mother kicks off her shoes almost the minute she arrives. She’s always loved the beach. Delores won’t remove her sandals, and certainly not her knee-high nylons. “I’ll be right over there,” I say, pointing to the big white house behind us. “Shouldn’t take too long. There’s lemonade in the cooler, and cookies.”

  “Don’t worry about us,” says Delores. “We’ll behave ourselves. Right, Miz Margaret?” I’ve told her the “Miz” is unnecessary, but she insists. “You sure you going to be all right, yourself? You don’t even know that woman. And you ain’t too good around dogs.”

  “I’m okay around dogs.”

  “How come you ain’t got one, like every other single lady in your building?” It’s true: it seems that my condo building is full of old ladies with dogs. Even the elevator smells like dogs.