You Think It, I'll Say It(28)

Sitting in the back of the cab, I thought, Really? I was just on CNN and that’s your reaction? Then again, I had been disparaging first, and he had merely concurred.

I’d met Jason shortly after I made partner but before I started working on the Kendall case. A law school professor, a woman I consider my mentor, invited me to speak to her Criminal Procedure class, and Jason was a student, a 2L. He was actually a year older than I was but had spent the decade after college working in Honduras and El Salvador for an American aid organization, as I learned at the reception afterward when he came up to me, made small talk, then asked for my email address. Two days later, he emailed to ask if I wanted to meet for a drink. I was skeptical at first because Jason was not only significantly better-looking than my previous boyfriends but also a more attractive man than I am a woman, which, if you start paying attention, is a highly unusual dynamic. (I’ve concluded that there are more attractive women than men in the world, so the numbers work in men’s favor.) At first I couldn’t believe that this smart, even-keeled guy with curly brown hair and bright blue eyes was into me, and I still mostly feel this way—Jason is indeed smart and even-keeled, with curly brown hair and bright blue eyes—but it also strikes me, in retrospect, that if a young male partner from a law firm had come to talk to my Criminal Procedure class when I was a student, I would never have had the confidence to ask him out; I’d have asked him for a job, possibly, but not for a date.

Jason and I hadn’t been one of those couples that immediately become inseparable. I didn’t have time to see him more than once or twice a week, because I routinely worked until ten o’clock. After that first time we had drinks, Jason called to see if I wanted to get dinner—dinner on a Saturday night, a full-on date of the sort I’d been on only a handful of times, even though I was then thirty-one—and afterward we went to watch a movie at his apartment and I fell asleep ten minutes in. We hadn’t kissed yet except for a brief peck after the first date. Jason told me later that my falling asleep plus my general unavailability made him doubt that I liked him, and it’s occurred to me that he kept pursuing me for that very reason.

Because honestly, to this day, I don’t know what made him interested in me. It’s not that I hate myself, at least not most of the time—it’s just that it wouldn’t have been difficult for Jason to find a woman who was prettier, or more of a fighter for the underdog, or both. The one time I asked him about it, and I tried to ask as casually, as unpathetically, as possible, given that it’s an inherently pathetic question, he said, “Because you had your act together.” I think he was referring less to my career than to my not being anorexic or flat-out insane, in contrast to his previous girlfriends; one of them had literally weighed all her meals on a postage scale. Then he added, grinning, “And because you were a good lay.” I made a face when he said this, and he said, “What? That’s the ultimate compliment!”

I wonder, of course—it’s my deepest secret, and would likely be guessable to even a distant acquaintance—if Jason married me for my money. Not only for my money, but if my income nudged me into some category of desirability I might not otherwise have attained. Jason is for the little guy, yes, but he has quietly expensive taste. He spends more on clothes than I do—on Italian leather loafers or simple crewneck sweaters that, lo and behold, are cashmere—and he enjoys a good steak and a nice cocktail. Whereas my own enjoyment of these things is always accompanied by uneasiness—I still can’t order a thirty-dollar entrée without thinking, Holy shit, thirty dollars for an entrée?

These days, I make twenty times what Jason does, and we spend money in a way he never could on just his salary, and in a way neither of our families did when we were growing up. We’ll get a seventy-dollar bottle of wine with dinner at a restaurant on an ordinary Tuesday; we have a cleaning service that comes twice a week to the condo that I paid for in cash before we got married. And we almost willfully blew through money when planning our honeymoon. For months, we didn’t make any decisions about when or where we were going, and then one night in late spring, Jason said, “Let’s just hammer it out before we never go at all,” and so we ordered Thai food and brought our laptops to the dining room table and separately poked around websites for a destination and hotels and flights. Mostly we wanted it to be easy—no long flights, no intricate research required beforehand or on our arrival—but Jason also thought that lying on a beach for a week sounded boring, so we settled on coming out west. He was the one who found our hotel. At our dining room table, he said, “They have these cool little cabins.”

I leaned over so I could see his computer screen and said, “For eight hundred dollars a night?”

“What? We can afford it.” Sometimes when we discussed finances, Jason’s pronouns made my skin prickle—how casually he’d say we instead of you. Also, there was the fact that if he were the one earning more money, as in a traditional couple, there were certain ways I’d probably defer to him, accommodations I’d make that he seemed either unconcerned with or unaware of: He did significantly less of the cooking, rarely sorted the mail, and never made our bed. He would do any of these things if I asked, but he didn’t do them, as if they didn’t need doing, as long as I didn’t ask. We hadn’t signed a prenup because, against my better judgment and legal training, I’d pretended I found it persuasive—I’d pretended I wasn’t afraid he’d change his mind about me—when he said, “So not only do you think we’ll end up divorced but you think I’ll try to screw you over when we do?” We kept our savings accounts separate, but you don’t need a law degree to know that that’s legally meaningless. As a wedding present, I paid off his student loans. I’d wondered ahead of time if he’d let me, but declining didn’t seem to occur to him. He’d said, “Really? Thanks.” If I’d expected him to gasp, tear up, or otherwise express touched astonishment, I’d mistaken him for someone else.