Ben and I took a trip to Lake Anna to celebrate. We’d been married for almost three years by then, and Ben had warmed to the idea of having a lawyer for a wife.
“Maybe I can finally be a stay-at-home dad,” he said as he dipped a tortilla chip in salsa verde. We’d gone to a Mexican restaurant for lunch that Ben heard was good, and wouldn’t it be fun to do tequila flights for lunch? But neither of us was a heavy drinker. I could count on one hand the number of times I had gotten drunk during our marriage, and our wedding wasn’t even one of them.
I washed the second tequila shot down with sparkling water. “I totally get that women don’t like when men feel threatened by their success and all that, but I’m still just not sure how I feel about the whole stay-at-home-dad thing,” I admitted.
He told me about a coworker whose wife recently graduated from law school. They decided to start a family during her last year. It made good sense, he reported: She’d have the baby, take the bar exam, then start working when the baby was old enough to go to day care. At first I thought it was the tequila talking, but I quickly realized Ben was seriously floating the idea.
Our dissonant realities hit me like a punch in the nose.
All the nights I’d spent tucked away in our home office studying for the LSAT, falling more and more in love with the idea of becoming an entertainment lawyer, mulling over the pros and cons of living in New York versus LA—none of that mattered to Ben so long as I went to law school and started a family before I’d even started practicing.
The all-consuming intensity of law school kicked in overnight. I commuted to Georgetown and spent every waking minute studying. The nagging feeling about being unfulfilled in my marriage receded. Finding my footing as a law student required me to kick everything else to the back burner. Instead of torturing myself about my future with Ben, I forged ahead with my plan to excel academically and find every chance I could to break into entertainment law. I’d figure out the rest later.
Halfway through my first year, I brought up the idea of working in New York when I cautiously told Ben I wanted to spend the summer interning in the city.
“You mean we’d spend two months apart?” he asked.
“It’s pretty routine to go away for summer internships,” I explained nervously. “It would be with a top independent film company.”
He finally looked up from the TV. “Are you saying you already have an offer?”
“A Georgetown alum is their general counsel. He came down a couple of months ago to talk to the Entertainment Law Society about what he does. I got his card and kept in touch. I had a phone interview last week, and he emailed me this morning.”
He looked proud and distressed. “Wow ... okay. What happened to that DC trademarks firm my friend told us about? It’d be way closer. You sure you want to go all the way to New York?”
“Trademarks and entertainment law aren’t the same thing.”
He looked sullen. I flopped down next to him on the couch and kissed his cheek. “We’ll visit each other a lot. It’ll fly by.”
Ben only came to New York once to visit. By the time he visited, his presence felt like an intrusion. The internship was immersing me in a life I never could have imagined when I was shopping for cold cuts to pack his lunch. I was only responsible for myself. I rented a small room on the Lower East Side. Celebrities routinely came into the office for meetings. I was getting a preview of what life could be like. My world was becoming bigger.
I came back to DC as a second-year law student with an even clearer sense of what I wanted and what I didn’t. I was already a different person from when I started.
That year, I felt confident enough academically to survey the social landscape and go to the Barrister’s Ball—the law school prom—with a few friends. I’d asked Ben to come, but he wasn’t in the mood, so I went solo. Some of the guys from class asked where my husband was. I was surprised they even knew I was married.
I had a blast that night. I drank sugary cocktails, danced with a guy from my Trademarks class, and—for the first time in a long while—felt young and untethered.
When I got home, Ben was in bed watching TV.
“You have fun?” he asked, too distracted by aSeinfeldrerun to look over in my direction.
I tipsily tried to make him jealous. “So much fun. Everyone wanted to dance and buy me drinks all night.”
He chuckled. “That’s all right. I know who you’re coming home to.” Something about the way he said it made me feel unsettled in a way I couldn’t shake.
After four years of marriage, we were both guilty of letting romance fade. When we first bought our townhouse, we’d camp on the back patio and have sex to Dave Matthews. He would read aloud from his favorite books. Every experience felt new and exciting, because my world was just beginning. Now, we’d settled into a comfortable companionship.
I knew we were a ticking time bomb.
When I said I wanted to end our marriage just over a year later, he couldn’t make sense of it. He thought we were happy. But what is happiness when you’re in your twenties and you’ve barely experienced the world? Having someone to crawl into bed with and watch the same TV shows night after night? It was impossible to ignore that our visions of happily ever after didn’t match up.
Chapter Five
I finished my coffee and walked back to Jessica’s apartment, wanting to give myself enough time to figure out the subway from Brooklyn to the office. I showered and put on the Theory dress, then packed black pumps, my new employee paperwork, and a bottle of water into my Longchamp tote. I slid into the stylish pair of Tod’s loafers Jessica told me to borrow for the commute and did a final once-over in the mirror. I still felt like Ben’s wife pretending to be a New York lawyer.
The subway was overrun with men and women in suits. I finally found a seat after the train emptied at Wall Street, reading orientation emails until the train reached Forty-Second Street.
Abramson & Klein occupied floors forty-five to fifty of the MetLife Building, a glass-and-steel monument towering above Grand Central. The firm mainly hired from Harvard, Stanford, and Columbia, with a few recruits from less elite but still-prestigious schools who somehow made the cut. I was one of the lucky few. I’d cold emailed a partner who was a prominent Georgetown Law alum and was granted a courtesy interview. It was pure hustle; I had no connections.
