costume, but hers was more expensive than mine: padded shoulders and pinstripes, befitting an era when Dynasty set the tone for woman’s fashion. Nicky was in his standard starving-artist getup—faded blue jeans and a black turtleneck sweater.
When Nicky set up the meeting, I assumed Carolyn was just another one of his sexual conquests. Someone who would burn bright for a few weeks and then go the way of the dodo bird. Many who came before her had followed exactly that trajectory, and I assumed there were many more to come.
“You’ll like her. She’s a lawyer like you,” Nicky had told me.
In point of fact, Carolyn McDermott was a lawyer nothing like me.
She was a third-year associate at Martin Quinn, one of the biggest law firms in the country. An associateship there was the brass ring of the legal profession—at least until you came up for partner in the next decade. Even in the mid-1980s, they paid law school graduates $65,000, which was more than twice what I earned, and I’d already been practicing for four years. You didn’t get hired there without a perfect résumé. Nicky’d boasted that Carolyn had an Ivy League education and a clerkship with a well-respected federal judge before joining Martin Quinn.
My own pedigree had afforded me a path through the relative underbelly of the legal profession. Undergraduate and law school at St. John’s, which was second-rate in every way but its basketball team. Despite the fact that I’d gotten pretty good grades, no law firm would have me upon graduation, so I’d joined the Office of the Federal Defenders of New York—the FD, for short. For the next four years, I represented the vilest form of scum imaginable—drug dealers, wife beaters, rapists. When I left the office, my win-loss record at trial was 7–28. Although those were hardly Hall of Fame stats, nobody else among the office’s sixty-seven lawyers had even won twice.
I might have spent my career as a public defender had it not been for the fact that in some years my wife took home more than I did in her hodgepodge of jobs—waitress, babysitter, vocal tutor, actress. When I first mentioned that I was thinking of leaving the FD to go out on my own, she asked, “Can we afford it?” My answer—“Can we afford it if I stay?”—was only partly meant to be clever.
Unspoken between us was that when Anne turned thirty, I started becoming aware of her biological clock, even if she preferred to ignore it. Part of me thought that if I led by example, taking a job I didn’t necessarily love because that’s what grown-ups thinking about the future did, Anne would follow suit.
It had not worked out that way, at least not so far. To the contrary, whenever I mentioned that she might want to transition into a more stable lifestyle, she always used Nicky as a shield. “Are you also telling your best friend that he should have a regular job and give up his dream of becoming a novelist?”
The opening of my eponymous law firm taught me that being your own boss means you can actually lose money working. If it were not for court-appointed work, I would have gone under, but the thirty-five dollars an hour I was paid for those cases was scarcely enough for me to be able to pay my office rent.
My hours at the FD had been long, but at least when I left for the day, I was on my own time. Private practice worked the opposite way. If I had no billable work from nine to five—which was often the case—I had to work twice as hard after hours to drum up business. That meant attending bar association meetings that began at eight o’clock or taking out prospective clients or those I hoped would someday be business-referrers for drinks or dinner. Whatever the cause, I rarely arrived home before ten. By that time, Anne was usually out, participating in various open mic sessions. Our schedules made it akin to a harmonic convergence when we were together and awake at the same time.
Which was why I had hoped that Anne would join me to meet Carolyn. At the last minute, though, she had canceled. One of the Upper East Side families that paid her roughly my hourly rate to tutor their off-key daughter on vocal techniques had asked for an “emergency appointment” to prepare for an upcoming middle school audition.
“I’ll catch Nick’s next conquest,” she told me. “Probably be