You Think It, I'll Say It(27)

“Anyway, none of that is the reason I don’t like her,” I said. “Ashley and I were both on the volleyball team, and once we were the last ones leaving the locker room before practice. We weren’t talking. I was just standing by my locker, and she came over and said, ‘Will you tie my shoe?’ She put her foot on my thigh—I was wearing shorts, so the sole of her shoe was pressed against my skin—and I tied it, and she kind of smirked and walked out of the locker room. This was stupid of me, but when she’d asked, I’d assumed she’d injured herself and that’s why she couldn’t tie her own shoe—because otherwise, why would you ask someone to do it for you? But I watched her at practice, and she obviously wasn’t injured at all, and I realized she’d just been trying to, like, degrade me for her own amusement. That was the most obnoxious part, the pathological part. It would have been meaner but less weird if she’d had an audience and was trying to impress them by humiliating me. But she was just getting her jollies by herself.”

“Strange.” Jason’s tone was calm.

“That’s your only reaction?”

“What do you want me to say? She doesn’t seem like that person anymore. Obviously, if anything, she’s intimidated by you. But I couldn’t care less, so let’s blow them off.”

“We’ll keep running into them until they leave.”

“Who cares, if she’s this person you don’t like and never plan to see again?”

“I don’t want to spend the next forty-eight hours hiding from her.”

“Do you want to switch hotels?”

I scrutinized Jason’s face. “Are you joking?”

“This is our honeymoon,” he said. “You’re supposed to enjoy yourself.”

I was quiet before saying, “How old do you think her husband is?”

“Forty, maybe.”

“What do you think his job is?”

“Gynecologist.”

“Seriously.”

“How should I know? I-banking or something.”

“Do you think Ashley’s hot?” I asked.

Jason pondered the question for a few seconds. “She’s hot, but in a cheesy way. You know, what she looks like is a pharmaceutical rep.”

I felt so filled with love for him in that moment that, honestly, I almost teared up.

“Magpie,” he said. When our eyes met, he gestured at the table, where I’d set my cards down at Ashley’s approach. “It’s your turn.”



* * *



—

The way it came to pass that Ashley saw me on TV, the way I came to be scolded by strangers for betraying feminism, is that I entered law school right after getting my BA; worked very, very hard; became editor of the law review; was offered a job as an associate at Corster, Lemp, Shreiberg, and Levine, the civil-litigation and criminal-defense firm in Chicago where I’d spent the summers interning; continued to work very, very hard; and in 2005, after seven years, became the youngest person in the firm’s history, male or female, to make partner. Eight months later, while he was in Chicago to receive an award from a national organization dedicated to mentoring at-risk youth, Billy Kendall, a linebacker for the Carolina Panthers, invited a cocktail waitress back to his room after an evening of flirting at the bar in the lobby of the Sofitel and proceeded to either rape her (her version) or to have consensual sex with her (his version). Kendall hired Corster, Lemp, Shreiberg, and Levine to represent him, and how could it hurt the defense if one of Kendall’s lawyers was not only a woman but a woman about the same age as his accuser?

I’m not under any illusions; I realize the fact that I was the second seat for the trial, and that I was the one who cross-examined the cocktail waitress, wasn’t entirely due to my legal prowess, but I was not, as I know cynics suspected, just loitering around the counsel table, buffing my nails. Indeed, I prepared more rigorously than I’d ever prepared for any other trial—researching similar cases, poring over the police reports and witness statements, drafting and redrafting my cross-examination. Still, it’s indisputable that if not for my age and gender, I wouldn’t have been picked to appear on the cable-news shows during the three-week trial. I appeared mostly via satellite, when—I had never realized this was how TV worked—I’d be in a television studio in Chicago, looking at a blank screen and trying to seem engaged while the voice of the show’s host in New York or Atlanta was piped into my ear. I’d met with a media coach for four hours before my television debut, at Billy Kendall’s expense—in fact, probably unbeknownst to him, Kendall was not only paying for the coach but also paying me for the hours I spent with the coach—and the guy had recommended, as a way of not looking zoned out when I wasn’t the one talking, that I pretend the blank screen was a beloved elderly relative and that I smile in an open and encouraging way, but not to excess. The week after Billy Kendall was acquitted, I flew to New York for a fifteen-minute sit-down interview—an eternity in television time—with the host of a broadcast evening-news program. I actually found all the TV stuff stressful, but people who knew me, including my family, got a kick out of it, even if what I was on TV for was defending a man accused of rape.

The one person consistently unimpressed by my role in the trial was Jason, whom I’d been dating for a little less than a year and who was still in law school, spending the summer interning for an eight-person nonprofit that specialized in immigration services. After my first interview on national television, when I’d called Jason as I rode home from the local studio in a cab, I expressed surprise that the news anchor hadn’t seemed to know the difference between civil and criminal trials—he had kept referring to “the plaintiff’s side”—and Jason said, “?‘Television is a medium because it’s neither rare nor well-done.’ Isn’t that how that saying goes?”