See Me(14)

Are you sure about that?, the little voice inside her suddenly asked. Because you know that’s not quite true.

It had started off well enough, but wasn’t that always the case? Martenson, Hertzberg & Holdman was a midsize firm, and she worked principally for the primary litigator, Barney Holdman, doing insurance defense work. Barney was in his early sixties and a rainmaker for the firm, a legal genius who wore seersucker suits and spoke with a slow, heavy drawl straight from the mountains of North Carolina. To both clients and juries, he came across as the friendly grandfather type, but beneath the surface, he was hard-driving, prepared for everything, and demanding of associates. In working for him, she had the privilege of time, expertise, and money to prepare her cases, all of which was a far cry from her work as a prosecutor.

Jill was a bonus. As the only women in the office aside from secretaries and paralegals, who had their own cliques, Jill and Maria had hit it off right away, even though they worked in different departments. They had lunch together three or four times a week, and Jill often dropped by Maria’s office just to visit for a few minutes. She was quick-witted and made Maria laugh, but had an incisive legal mind and was one of the firm’s key assets. Why she hadn’t been made partner yet was a mystery. Maria sometimes wondered whether Jill was long for the firm, though she’d said nothing directly about it.

The real problem was Ken Martenson, the managing partner of the firm, who seemed to hire paralegals based on their attractiveness as opposed to their qualifications and spent too much time hovering around their desks. That part didn’t necessarily bother Maria, nor did it bother her to see Ken fraternizing with one paralegal or another in a manner that sometimes seemed less than entirely professional. Jill had filled her in on Ken’s reputation during Maria’s first week on the job, especially his interest in attractive paralegals, but Maria had shrugged it off. That is, until Ken began to set his sights on her. It wasn’t a good development, and lately the situation was getting even more complicated. It was one thing to try to avoid Ken at the office, where there were always other people around, but the conference in Winston-Salem they’d attended last week had amplified her fears that things might get worse. Though Ken hadn’t gone so far as to walk her to her hotel room door – thank God for small favors – he had pressured her into joining him for dinner both nights. And then? He’d given her the whole my wife just doesn’t appreciate me spiel while continually asking whether she wanted another glass of wine, despite the fact that she’d barely touched the first one. He’d talked about his place at the beach and how quiet and relaxing it was and noted more than once that it was usually empty. If she ever wanted to use it, all she had to do was ask. And had he mentioned how rare it was to work with someone who was both intelligent and beautiful?

Could the man have been more obvious? Nevertheless, when he’d hinted at what he wanted, she’d played dumb and then steered the subject back to the issues discussed at the conference. And it had worked, for the most part, but she hadn’t been lying to Serena when she’d said it was complicated. Sometimes she wished that someone would have told her before she applied to law school that being an attorney wasn’t quite the job guarantee she’d always imagined it would be. In the past few years, firms of all sizes had been cutting back, salaries were dropping, and right now there were too many lawyers chasing too few positions. After she’d left the district attorney’s office, it had taken her nearly five months to land this job, and as far as she knew, none of the other firms in town were hiring. If she even mumbled the words sexual harassment or vaguely hinted about filing a lawsuit, she probably wouldn’t be able to find another job in the entire state. Lawyers hated no one more than other lawyers who might sue them.

For the time being, she was stuck. She’d made it through the conference but vowed not to put herself in that kind of situation again. She’d avoid the break room and be a bit more cautious about working late, especially when she knew Ken would be there. For now, that was all she could do, aside from pray that he turned his sights back on one of the paralegals.

It was yet another example of the ways in which life had turned out to be more difficult than she’d imagined it would. When she’d started her first real job, she’d been idealistic; life had seemed more like an adventure. She’d fully believed that she had a meaningful role to play in keeping the streets safe and in giving victims a way to seek justice and redress. But over time, she’d begun to grow jaded about the entire process. It had become evident that even dangerous criminals often went free, the clogged wheels of the system turned impossibly slowly, and her caseload was never-ending. Now she was living again in the city where she’d grown up and practicing a kind of law vastly different from what she’d known as an assistant DA. While she’d been certain that things would be better once she was settled in, she’d slowly come to realize that job stress simply came in different flavors, and this one wasn’t much better tasting than the one before it.

She’d been surprised by that, but then, she’d been surprised by almost everything in the last seven years. The world might view her as a young, home-owning professional, but there were moments when she felt like she was faking the whole thing. Part of it was financial – after paying her bills at the end of the month, she had less spending money than she’d had as a teenager – but the other part was that most of her friends from college were already married, and some of them already had kids. When she talked to them, most came across as completely content, as though their lives were unfolding exactly as they’d planned, while she, on the other hand, had a sex-crazed boss, a condo she could barely afford, and a younger sister who seemed simultaneously wiser and more carefree than Maria was. If this was adulthood, she wondered now why she’d been in such a rush to grow up in the first place.