Love Saves the Day

As much as Laura appreciated the fraternal spirit of these impromptu lunches, it was the early-morning or late-evening hours, when the conference room was empty, that she enjoyed most. She could look through the windows and all the way down onto the silent diorama of the city streets below, and the very silence of it soothed her. The Empire State Building was more than ten blocks away, but the illusion created by the height of her own building made it seem as though she were level with its peak. On hot summer nights, Laura would watch as its pinnacle was repeatedly struck by heat lightning, a display of kinetic energy rendered mute by the thick, reinforced windows of her office building. She’d grown up in a neighborhood loud with the twenty-four-hour cacophony of dance music blared from boom boxes, of police sirens and domestic arguments and glass shattering on pavement, the all-night hum of after-hours partiers that gave way each morning to the rumble of overcrowded buses and the metal clank of store grates rolling up. In the five-story walk-up she and Sarah had lived in, these sounds had been a constant assault, even with the windows closed. And they’d been intensified by the noise from their own building, babies wailing and neighbors flushing toilets or walking on the floors overhead.

People talked about the views to be had on higher floors, but Laura knew it was the silence, the serenity of heights, that one paid obscene sums for in a city like New York. Noise was one of a thousand indignities visited upon the poor. Money was the only thing that could buy the illusion of peace.

Perry had learned to look for Laura in the forty-seventh-floor conference room when the rest of the office was quiet. It was here that she came to think, to give her mind the break from computer screens and buzzing BlackBerrys and allow it to formulate creative solutions to knotty problems.

Perry poked his head in now and said, “It’s almost nine o’clock. You should get home to your husband like a good newlywed.”

Laura turned her face from the window. “I can’t. Clay just dumped this project for Balaban Media on me.” Clayton Newell was Neuman Daines’s managing partner, and a figure of terror to all the firm’s associates. “He says he needs it turned around by seven o’clock Monday morning.”

“Yes, but you and I both know Clay won’t be in Monday before ten thirty. It’ll keep.” Perry smiled. “The key to having a life in this business is training people to expect the best of you, not all of you at once.”

Perry Steadman was Laura’s “rabbi,” a senior partner who had recognized Laura’s potential early on and taken her under his wing. He was a short man in his fifties with thinning hair and a laid-back approach to his practice and his negotiations that belied the sharp mind at work behind them. And even though Perry’s “rabbi” designation was strictly metaphorical, he had a true rabbi’s fondness for quoting the Talmud. “Two cripples don’t make one dancer,” he’d told Laura more than once. “Everybody’s a cripple to some extent. The trick is never putting together two parties who are equally crippled, or crippled in the same way. Otherwise you’ll be up to your eyeballs in paperwork when they realize they can’t dance together.”

Not every associate was fortunate, or strategic, enough to find a rabbi, particularly one as influential within the firm as Perry. Perry was an acknowledged rainmaker, a partner who landed large corporate clients for the firm and then distributed the work to Corporate group associates. He’d noted Laura’s quick mind and rigorous approach back when she was still a summer associate, and when she was a first-year he’d made a point of routing her way the more complex of the memos and briefs first-years were expected to spend the majority of their time hammering out. Laura, who had attended Hunter College and Fordham Law in the city, noted with inward satisfaction how much more quickly she was rising than some of the Ivy Leaguers she’d started out with, although she was careful never to let her sense of her own success show outwardly.

She had come to specialize in contracts, and she was more at home among the language of contracts than anywhere else. There was something profoundly comforting in having all worst-case scenarios accounted for and resolved ahead of time, nailed down in the black-and-white precision of a signed and witnessed document. In a perfect world, Laura thought, all of life’s surprises would be anticipated and disposed of with equal ease.