The House Girl Read Free Page A

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 om s 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.